Walter Besant
All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story
Could he give up all these things? He could not conceive it possible, you see, that a man should go and become a workman, receiving a wage and obeying orders, and afterward resume his old place among gentlemen, as if nothing had happened. Indeed, it would require a vast amount of explanation.
Then he began to consider what he would get if he remained.
One thing only would reward him. He was so far gone in love, that for this girl's sake he would renounce everything and become a workman indeed.
He could not work; the quiet of the room oppressed him; he must be up and moving while this struggle went on.
Then he thought of his uncle Bunker and laughed, remembering his discomfiture and wrath. While he was laughing the door opened, and the very man appeared.
He had lost his purple hue, and was now, in fact, rather pale, and his cheeks looked flabby.
"Nephew," he said huskily, "I want to talk to you about this thing; give over sniggerin', and talk serious now."
"Let us be serious."
"This is a most dreadful mistake of Miss Messenger's; you know at first I thought it must be a joke. That is why I went away; men of my age and respectability don't like jokes. But it was no joke. I see now it is just a mere dreadful mistake which you can set right."
"How can I set it right?"
"To be sure, I could do it myself, very easily. I have only got to write to her, and tell her that you've got no character, and nobody knows if you know your trade."
"I don't think that would do, because I might write as well – "
"The best plan would be for you to refuse the situation and go away again. Look here, boy; you come from no one knows where; you live no one knows how; you don't do any work; my impression is you don't want any, and you've only come to see what you can borrow or steal. That's my opinion. Now, don't let's argue, but just listen. If you'll go away quietly, without any fuss, just telling them at the brewery that you've got to go, I'll give you – yes – I'll give you – twenty pounds down! There!"
"Very liberal indeed! But I am afraid – "
"I'll make it twenty-five. A man of spirit can do anything with twenty-five pounds down. Why, he might go to the other end of the world. If I were you I'd go there. Large openings there for a lad of spirit – large openings! Twenty-five pounds down, on the nail."
"It seems a generous offer, still – "
"Nothing," Mr. Bunker went on, "has gone well since you came. There's this dreadful mistake of Miss Messenger's; then that Miss Kennedy's job. I didn't make anything out of that compared with what I might, and there's the – " He stopped, because he was thinking of the houses.
"I want you to go," he added almost plaintively.
"And that, very much, is one of the reasons why I want to stay. Because, you see, you have not yet answered a question of mine. What did you get for me when you traded me away?"
For the second time his question produced a very remarkable effect upon the good man.
When he had gone, slamming the door behind him, Harry smiled sweetly.
"I know," he said, "that he has done 'something,' as they call it. Bunker is afraid. And I – yes – I shall find it out and terrify him still more. But, in order to find it out, I must stay. And if I stay, I must be a workman. And wear an apron! And a brown-paper cap! No. I draw the line above aprons. No consideration shall induce me to wear an apron. Not even – no – not if she were to make the apron a condition of marriage."
CHAPTER XVI.
HARRY'S DECISION
He spent the afternoon wandering about the streets of Stepney, full of the new thought that here might be his future home. This reflection made him regard the place from quite a novel point of view. As a mere outsider, he had looked upon the place critically, with amusement, with pity, with horror (in rainy weather), with wonder (in sunshiny days). He was a spectator, while before his eyes were played as many little comedies, comediettas, or tragedies or melodramas as there were inhabitants. But no farces, he remarked, and no burlesques. The life of industry contains no elements of farce or of burlesque. But if he took this decisive step he would have to look upon the East End from an inside point of view; he would be himself one of the actors; he would play his own little comedy. Therefore he must introduce the emotion of sympathy, and suppress the critical attitude altogether.
There was once an earl who went away and became a sailor before the mast; he seems to have enjoyed sailoring better than legislating, but was, by accident, ingloriously drowned while so engaged. There was also the Honorable Timothy Clitheroe Davenant, who was also supposed to be drowned, but in reality exercised until his death, and apparently with happiness, the craft of wheelwright. There was another unfortunate nobleman, well known to fame, who became a butcher in a colony, and liked it. Precedents enough of voluntary descent and eclipse, to say nothing of the involuntary obscurations, as when an émigré had to teach dancing, or the son of a royal duke was fain to become a village schoolmaster. These historical parallels pleased Harry's fancy until he recollected that he was himself only a son of the people, and not of noble descent, so that they really did not bear upon his case, and he could find not one single precedent in the whole history parallel with himself. "Mine," he said, formulating the thing, "is a very remarkable and unusual case. Here is a man brought up to believe himself of gentle birth and educated as a gentleman, so that there is nothing in the most liberal training of a gentleman that he has not learned, and no accomplishment which becomes a gentleman that he has not acquired. Then he learns that he is not a gentleman by birth, and that he is a pauper; wherefore, why not honest work? Work is noble, to be sure, especially if you get the kind of work you like, and please yourself about the time of doing it; nothing could be a more noble spectacle than that of myself working at the lathe for nothing, in the old days; would it be quite as noble at the brewery, doing piece-work?"
These reflections, this putting of the case to himself, this grand dubiety, occupied the whole afternoon. When the evening came, and it was time for him to present himself in the drawing-room, he was no further advanced toward a decision.
The room looked bright and restful; wherever Angela went, she was accompanied and surrounded by an atmosphere of refinement. Those who conversed with her became infected with her culture; therefore, the place was like any drawing-room at the West End, save for the furniture, which was simple. Ladies would have noticed, even in such little things, in the way in which the girls sat and carried themselves, a note of difference. To Harry these minutiæ were unknown, and he saw only a room full of girls quietly happy and apparently well-bred; some were reading; some were talking, one or two were "making" something for themselves, though their busy fingers had been at work all day. Nelly and Miss Kennedy were listening to the captain, who was telling a yarn of his old East Indiaman. The three made a pretty group, Miss Kennedy seated on a low stool at the captain's knee, while the old man leaned forward in his arm-chair, his daughter beside him watching, in her affectionate and pretty way, the face of her patron.
The quiet, peaceful air of the room, the happy and contented faces which before had been so harassed and worn, struck the young man's heart. Part of this had been his doing; could he go away and leave the brave girl who headed the little enterprise to the tender mercies of a Bunker? The thought of what he was throwing up – the club-life, the art-life, the literary life, the holiday-time, the delightful roving in foreign lands, which he should enjoy no more – all seemed insignificant considered beside this haven of rest and peace in the troubled waters of the East End. He was no philanthropist; the cant of platforms was intolerable to him; yet he was thinking of a step which meant giving up his own happiness for that of others; with, of course, the constant society of the woman he loved. Without that compensation the sacrifice would be impossible. Miss Kennedy looked up and nodded to him kindly, motioning him not to interrupt the story, which the captain presently finished.
Then they had a little music and a little playing, and there was a little dancing – all just as usual; a quiet, pleasant evening; and they went away.
"You are silent to-night, Mr. Goslett," said Angela, as they took their customary walk in the quiet little garden called Stepney Green.
"Yes. I am like the parrot; I think the more."
"What is in your mind?"
"This: I have had an offer – an offer of work – from the brewery. Miss Messenger herself sent the offer, which I am to accept or to refuse to-morrow morning."
"An offer of work? I congratulate you. Of course you will accept?" She looked at him sharply, even suspiciously.
"I do not know."
"You have forgotten," she said – in other girls the words and the tone of her voice would have sounded like an encouragement – "you have forgotten what you said only last Sunday evening."
"No: I have not forgotten. What I said last Sunday evening only increases my embarrassment. I did not expect, then – I did not think it possible that any work here would be offered to me."
"Is the pay insufficient?"
"No: the pay is to be at the usual market-rate."
"Are the hours too long?"
"I am to please myself. It seems as if the young lady had done her best to make me as independent as a man who works for money can be."
"Yet you hesitate. Why?"
He was silent – thinking what he should tell her. The whole truth would have been best; but then, one so seldom tells the whole truth about anything, far less about one's self. He could not tell her that he had been masquerading all the time, after so many protestations of being a real working-man.
"Is it that you do not like to make friends among the East End workmen?"
"No." He could answer this with truth. "It is not that. The working-men here are better than I expected to find them. They are more sensible, more self-reliant, and less dangerous. To be sure, they profess to entertain an unreasoning dislike for rich people, and, I believe, think that their lives are entirely spent over oranges and skittles. I wish they had more knowledge of books, and could be got to think in some elemental fashion about art. I wish they had a better sense of beauty, and I wish they could be got to cultivate some of the graces of life. You shall teach them, Miss Kennedy. Also, I wish that tobacco was not their only solace. I am very much interested in them. That is not the reason."
"If you please to tell me – " she said.
"Well, then" – he would tell that fatal half-truth – "the reason is this; you know that I have had an education above what fortune intended for me when she made me the son of Sergeant Goslett."
"I know," she replied. "It was my case, as well; we are companions in this great happiness."
"The man who conferred this benefit upon me, the best and kindest-hearted man in the world, to whom I am indebted for more than I can tell you, is willing to do more for me. If I please, I may live with him in idleness."
"You may live in idleness? That must be, indeed, a tempting offer!"
"Idleness," he replied, a little hurt at her contempt for what certainly was a temptation for him, "does not always mean doing nothing."
"What would you do, then?"
"There is the life of culture and art – "
"Oh, no!" she replied. "Would you really like to become one of those poor creatures who think they lead lives devoted to art? Would you like to grow silly over blue china, to quarrel about color, to worship form in poetry, to judge everything by the narrow rules of the latest pedantic fashion?"
"You know this art world, then?"
"I know something of it, I have heard of it. Never mind me – think of yourself. You would not, you could not, condemn yourself to such a life."
"Not to such a life as you picture. But, consider, I am offered a life of freedom instead of servitude."
"Servitude! Why, we are all servants one of the other. Society is like the human body, in which all the limbs belong to each other. There must be rich and poor, idlers and workers; we depend one upon the other; if the rich do not work with and for the poor, retribution falls upon them. The poor must work for the rich, or they will starve; poor or rich, I think it is better to be poor; idler or worker, I know it is better to be worker."
He thought of Lord Jocelyn; of the pleasant chambers in Piccadilly, of the club, of his own friends, of society, of little dinners, of stalls at the theatre; of suppers among actors and actresses; of artists and the smoking-parties; of the men who write, and the men who talk, and the men who know everybody, and are full of stories; of his riding, and hunting, and shooting; of his fencing, and billiards, and cards.
All these things passed through his brain swiftly, in a moment. And then he thought of the beautiful woman beside him, whose voice was the sweetest music to him that he had ever heard.
"You must take the offer," she went on, and her words fell upon his ear like the words of an oracle to a Greek in doubt. "Work at the brewery is not hard. You will have no task-master set over you; you are free to go and come, to choose your own time; there will be in so great a place, there must be, work, quite enough to occupy your time. Give up yearning after an idle life, and work in patience."
"Is there anything," he said, "to which you could not persuade me?"
"Oh, not for me!" she replied impatiently. "It is for yourself. You have your life before you, to throw away or to use. Tell me," she hesitated a little; "you have come back to your own kith and kin, after many years. They were strange to you at first, all these people of the East End – your own people. Now that you know them, should you like to go away from them, altogether away and forget them? Could you desert them? You know, if you go, that you will desert them, for between this end of London and the other there is a great gulf fixed, across which no one ever passes. You will leave us altogether if you leave us now."
At this point Harry felt the very strongest desire to make it clear that what concerned him most would be the leaving her, but he repressed the temptation and merely remarked that, if he did desert his kith and kin, they would not regret him. His Uncle Bunker, he explained, had even offered him five-and-twenty pounds to go.
"It is not that you have done anything, you know, except to help us in our little experiment," said Angela. "But it is what you may do, what you shall do, if you remain."
"What can I do?"
"You have knowledge; you have a voice; you have a quick eye and a ready tongue; you could lead, you could preside. Oh! what a career you might have before you!"
"You think too well of me, Miss Kennedy. I am a very lazy and worthless kind of man."
"No." She shook her head and smiled superior. "I know you better than you know yourself. I have watched you for these months. And then we must not forget, there is our Palace of Delight."
"Are we millionaires?"
"Why, we have already begun it. There is our drawing-room; it is only a few weeks old, yet see what a difference there is already. The girls are happy; their finer tastes are awakened; their natural yearnings after things delightful are partly satisfied; they laugh and sing now; they run about and play. There is already something of our dream realized. Stay with us, and we shall see the rest."
He made an effort and again restrained himself.
"I stay, then," he said, "for your sake – because you command me to stay."
Had she done well? She asked herself the question in the shelter of her bedroom, with great doubt and anxiety. This young workman, who might if he chose be a – well – yes – a gentleman – quite as good a gentleman as most of the men who pretend to the title – was going to give up whatever prospects he had in the world, at her bidding, and for her sake. For her sake! Yet what he wished was impossible.
What reward, then, had she to offer him that would satisfy him? Nothing. Stay, he was only a man. One pretty face was as good as another; he was struck with hers for the moment. She would put him in the way of being attracted by another. Yes: that would do. This settled in her own mind, she put the matter aside, and, as she was very sleepy, she only murmured to herself, as her eyes closed, "Nelly Sorensen."
CHAPTER XVII.
WHAT LORD JOCELYN THOUGHT
The subject of Angela's meditations was not where she thought him, in his own bedroom. When he left his adviser, he did not go in at once, but walked once or twice up and down the pavement, thinking. What he had promised to do was nothing less than to reverse, altogether, the whole of his promised life; and this is no light matter, even if you do it for love's sweet sake. And, Miss Kennedy being no longer with him, he felt a little chilled from the first enthusiasm. Presently he looked at his watch; it was still early, only half-past ten.
"There is the chance," he said. "It is only a chance. He generally comes back somewhere about this time."
There are no cabs at Stepney, but there are tramways which go quite as fast, and, besides, give one the opportunity of exchanging ideas on current topics with one's travelling companions. Harry jumped into one, and sat down between a bibulous old gentleman, who said he lived in Fore Street, but had for the moment mislaid all his other ideas, and a lady who talked to herself as she carried a bundle. She was rehearsing something dramatic, a monologue, in which she was "giving it" to somebody unknown. And she was so much under the influence and emotion of imagination that the young man trembled lest he might be mistaken for the person addressed. However, happily, the lady so far restrained herself, and Aldgate was reached in peace. There he took a hansom and drove to Piccadilly.
The streets looked strange to him after his three months' absence; the lights, the crowds on the pavements, so different from the East End crowd; the rush of the carriages and cabs taking the people home from the theatre, filled him with a strange longing. He had been asleep; he had had a dream; there was no Stepney; there was no Whitechapel Road – a strange and wondrous dream. Miss Kennedy and her damsels were only a part of this vision. A beautiful and delightful dream. He was back again in Piccadilly, and all was exactly as it always had been. So far all was exactly the same, for Lord Jocelyn was in his chamber and alone.
"You are come back to me, Harry?" he said, holding the young man's hand; "you have had enough of your cousins and the worthy Bunker. Sit down, boy. I heard your foot on the stairs. I have waited for it a long time. Sit down and let me look at you. To-morrow you shall tell me all your adventures."
"It is comfortable," said Harry, taking his old chair and one of his guardian's cigarettes. "Yes, Piccadilly is better, in some respects, than Whitechapel."
"And there is more comfort the higher up you climb, eh?"
"Certainly, more comfort. There is not, I am sure, such an easy-chair as this east of St. Paul's."
Then they were silent, as becomes two men who know what is in each other's heart, and wait for it to be said.
"You look well," said Harry presently. "Where did you spend the summer?"
"Mediterranean. Yacht. Partridges."
"Of course. Do you stay in London long?"
And so on. Playing with the talk, and postponing the inevitable, Harry learned where everybody had been, and who was engaged, and who was married, and how one or two had joined the majority since his departure. He also heard the latest scandal, and the current talk, and what had been done at the club, and who had been blackballed, with divers small bits of information about people and things. And he took up the talk in the old manner, and fell into the old attitude of mind quite naturally, and as if there had been no break at all. Presently the clock pointed to one, and Lord Jocelyn rose.
"We will talk again to-morrow, Harry, my boy, and the day after to-morrow, and many days after that. I am glad to have you back again." He laid his hand upon the young man's shoulder.
"Do not go just yet," said Harry, blushing and feeling guilty, because he was going to inflict pain on one who loved him. "I cannot talk with you to-morrow."
"Why not?"
"Because – sit down again and listen – because I have made up my mind to join my kith and kin altogether, and stay among them."
"What? Stay among them?"
"You remember what you told me of your motive in taking me. You would bring up a boy of the people like a gentleman. You would educate him in all that a gentleman can learn, and then you would send him back to his friends, whom he would make discontented, and so open the way for civilization."
"I said so – did I? Yes: but there were other things, Harry. You forget that motives are always mixed. There was affection for my brave sergeant and a desire to help his son; there were all sorts of things. Besides, I expected that you would take a rough kind of polish only – like nickel, you know, or pewter – and you turned out real silver. A gentleman, I thought, is born, not made. This proved a mistake. The puddle blood would show, I expected, which was prejudice, you see, because there is no such thing as puddle blood. Besides, I thought you would be stupid and slow to pick up ideas, and that you would pick up only a few; supposing, in my ignorance, that all persons not 'born,' as the Germans say, must be stupid and slow."
"And I was not stupid?"
"You? The brightest and cleverest lad in the whole world – you stepped into the place I made for you as if you had been born for it. Now tell me why you wish to step out of it."
"Like you, sir I have many motives. Partly, I am greatly interested in my own people; partly, I am interested in the place itself and its ways; partly, I am told, and I believe, that there is a great deal which I can do there – do not laugh at me."
"I am not laughing, Harry; I am only astonished. Yes, you are changed, your eyes are different, your voice is different. Go on, my boy."
"I do not think there is much to say – I mean, in explanation. But of course I understand – it is a part of the thing – that if I stay among them I must be independent. I could no longer look to your bounty, which I have accepted too long. I must work for my living."
"Work! And what will you do?"
"I know a lot of things, but somehow they are not wanted at Stepney, and the only thing by which I can make money seems to be my lathe – I have become a cabinet-maker."
"Heavens! You have become a cabinet-maker? Do you actually mean, Harry, that you are going to work – with your hands – for money?"
"Yes; with my hands. I shall be paid for my work; I shall live by my work. The puddle blood, you see."
"No, no," said Lord Jocelyn, "there is no proof of puddle blood in being independent. But think of the discomfort of it."
"I have thought of the discomfort. It is not really so very bad. What is your idea of the life I shall have to live?"
"Why," said Lord Jocelyn, with a shudder, "you will rise at six; you will go out in working-clothes, carrying your tools, and with your apron tied round and tucked up like a missionary bishop on his way to a confirmation. You will find yourself in a workshop full of disagreeable people, who pick out unpleasant adjectives and tack them on to everything, and whose views of life and habits are – well, not your own. You will have to smoke pipes at a street corner on Sundays; your tobacco will be bad; you will drink bad beer – Harry! the contemplation of the thing is too painful."
Harry laughed.
"The reality is not quite so bad," he said. "Cabinet-makers are excellent fellows. And as for myself, I shall not work in a shop, but alone. I am offered the post of cabinet-maker in a great place where I shall have my own room to myself, and can please my own convenience as to my hours. I shall earn about tenpence an hour – say seven shillings a day, if I keep at it."
"If he keeps at it," murmured Lord Jocelyn, "he will make seven shillings a day."
"Dinner in the middle of the day, of course." Harry went on, with a cheerful smile. "At the East End everybody stokes at one. We have tea at five and supper when we can get it. A simpler life than yours."
"This is a programme of such extreme misery," said Lord Jocelyn, "that your explanations are quite insufficient. Is there, I wonder, a woman in the case?"
Harry blushed violently.
"There is a woman, then?" said his guardian triumphantly. "There always is. I might have guessed it from the beginning. Come, Harry, tell me all about it. Is it serious? Is she – can she be – at Whitechapel – a lady?"
"Yes," said Harry, "it is quite true. There is a woman, and I am in love with her. She is a dressmaker."
"Oh!"
"And a lady."
Lord Jocelyn said nothing.
"A lady." Harry repeated the words, to show that he knew what he was saying. "But it is no use. She won't listen to me."
"That is more remarkable than your two last statements. Many men have fallen in love with dressmakers, some dressmakers have acquired partially the manners of a lady; but that any dressmaker should refuse the honorable attentions of a handsome young fellow like you, and a gentleman, is inconceivable."
"A cabinet-maker, not a gentleman. But do not let us talk of her, if you please."
Then Lord Jocelyn proceeded, with such eloquence as was at his command, to draw a picture of what he was throwing away compared with what he was accepting. There was a universal feeling, he assured his ward, of sympathy with him: everybody felt that it was rough on such a man as himself to find that he was not of illustrious descent; he would take his old place in society; all his old friends would welcome him back among them, with much more to the same purpose.
It was four o'clock in the morning when their conversation ended and Lord Jocelyn went to bed sorrowful, promising to renew his arguments in the morning. As soon as he was gone, Harry went to his own room and put together a few little trifles belonging to the past which he thought he should like. Then he wrote a letter of farewell to his guardian, promising to report himself from time to time, with a few words of gratitude and affection. And then he stole quietly down the stairs and found himself in the open street. Like a school-boy, he had run away.
There was nobody left in the streets. Half-past four in the morning is almost the quietest time of any; even the burglar has gone home, and it is too early for anything but the market-garden carts on their way to Covent Garden. He strode down Piccadilly and across the silent Leicester Square into the Strand. He passed through that remarkable thoroughfare, and, by way of Fleet Street, where even the newspaper offices were deserted, the leader-writers and the editor and the subeditors all gone home to bed, to St. Paul's. It was then a little after five, and there was already a stir. An occasional footfall along the principal streets. By the time he got to the Whitechapel Road there were a good many up and about, and before he reached Stepney Green the day's work was beginning. The night had gone and the sun was rising, for it was six o'clock and a cloudless morning. At ten he presented himself once more at the accountant's office.
"Well?" asked the chief.
"I am come," said Harry, "to accept Miss Messenger's offer."
"You seem pretty independent. However, that is the way with you working-men nowadays. I suppose you don't even pretend to feel any gratitude?"
"I don't pretend," said Harry pretty hotly, "to answer questions outside the work I have to do."
The chief looked at him as if he could, if he wished, and was not a Christian, annihilate him.
"Go, young man," he said presently, pointing to the door, "go to your work. Rudeness to his betters a working-man considers due to himself, I suppose. Go to your work."
Harry obeyed without a word, being in such a rage that he could not speak. When he reached his workshop, he found waiting to be mended an office-stool with a broken leg. I regret to report that this unhappy stool immediately became a stool with four broken legs and a kicked-out seat.
Harry was for the moment too strong for the furniture.
Not even the thought of Miss Kennedy's approbation could bring him comfort. He was an artisan, he worked by the piece – that was nothing. The galling thing was to realize that he must now behave to certain classes with a semblance of respect, because now he had his "betters."
The day before he was a gentleman who had no "betters." He was enriched by this addition to his possessions, and yet he was not grateful.
