Paul Kelver

So the old house held us to its dismal bosom; and not until within its homely but unlovely arms, first my aunt, and later on my mother had died, and I had said good-bye to Amy, crying in the midst of littered emptiness, did I leave it.

My aunt died as she had lived, grumbling.

“You will be glad to get rid of me, all of you!” she said, dropping for the first and last time I can recollect into the retort direct; “and I can’t say I shall be very sorry to go myself. It hasn’t been my idea of life.”

Poor old lady! That was only a couple of weeks before the end. I do not suppose she guessed it was so certain or perhaps she might have been more sentimental.

“Don’t be foolish,” said my mother, “you’re not going to die!”

“What’s the use of talking like an idiot,” retorted my aunt, “I’ve got to do it some time. Why not now, when everything’s all ready for it. It isn’t as if I was enjoying myself.”

“I am sure we do all we can for you,” said my mother. “I know you do,” replied my aunt. “I’m a burden to you. I always have been.”

“Not a burden,” corrected my mother.

“What does the woman call it then,” snapped back my aunt. “Does she reckon I’ve been a sunbeam in the house? I’ve been a trial to everybody. That’s what I was born for; it’s my metier.”

My mother put her arms about the poor old soul and kissed her. “We should miss you very much,” she said.

“I’m sure I hope they all will!” answered my aunt. “It’s the only thing I’ve got to leave ‘em, worth having.”

My mother laughed.

“Maybe it’s been a good thing for you, Maggie,” grumbled my aunt; “if it wasn’t for cantankerous, disagreeable people like me, gentle, patient people like you wouldn’t get any practice. Perhaps, after all, I’ve been a blessing to you in disguise.”

I cannot honestly say we ever wished her back; though we certainly did miss her – missed many a joke at her oddities, many a laugh at her cornery ways. It takes all sorts, as the saying goes, to make a world. Possibly enough if only we perfect folk were left in it we would find it uncomfortably monotonous.

As for Amy, I believe she really regretted her.

“One never knows what’s good for one till one’s lost it,” sighed Amy.

“I’m glad to think you liked her,” said my mother.

“You see, mum,” explained Amy, “I was one of a large family; and a bit of a row now and again cheers one up, I always think. I’ll be losing the power of my tongue if something doesn’t come along soon.”

“Well, you are going to be married in a few weeks now,” my mother reminded her.

But Amy remained despondent. “They’re poor things, the men, at a few words, the best of them,” she replied. “As likely as not just when you’re getting interested you turn round to find that they’ve put on their hat and gone out.”

My mother and I were very much alone after my aunt’s death. Barbara had gone abroad to put the finishing touches to her education – to learn the tricks of the Nobs’ trade, as old Hasluck phrased it; and I had left school and taken employment with Mr. Stillwood, without salary, the idea being that I should study for the law.

“You are in luck’s way, my boy, in luck’s way,” old Mr. Gadley had assured me. “To have commenced your career in the office of Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal will be a passport for you anywhere. It will stamp you, my boy.”

Mr. Stillwood himself was an extremely old and feeble gentleman – so old and feeble it seemed strange that he, a wealthy man, had not long ago retired.

“I am always meaning to,” he explained to me one day soon after my advent in his office. “When your poor father came to me he told me very frankly the sad fact – that he had only a few more years to live. ‘Mr. Kelver,’ I answered him, ‘do not let that trouble you, so far as I am concerned. There are one or two matters in the office I should like to see cleared up, and in these you can help me. When they are completed I shall retire! Yet, you see, I linger on. I am like the old hackney coach horse, Mr. Weller – or is it Mr. Jingle – tells us of; if the shafts were drawn away I should probably collapse. So I jog on, I jog on.’”

He had married late in life a common woman much younger than himself, who had brought to him a horde of needy and greedy relatives, and no doubt, as a refuge from her noisy neighbourhood, the daily peace of Lombard Street was welcome to him. We saw her occasionally. She was one of those blustering, “managing” women who go through life under the impression that making a disturbance is somehow “putting things to rights.” Ridiculously ashamed of her origin, she sought to hide it under what her friends assured her was the air of a duchess, but which, as a matter of fact, resembled rather the Sunday manners of an elderly barmaid. Mr. Gadley alone was not afraid of her; but, on the contrary, kept her always very much in fear of him, often speaking to her with refreshing candour. He had known her in the days it was her desire should be buried in oblivion, and had always resented as a personal insult her entry into the old established aristocratic firm of Stillwood & Co.

Her history was peculiar. Mr. Stillwood, when a blase man about town, verging on forty, had first seen her, then a fair-haired, ethereal-looking child, in spite of her dirt, playing in the gutter. To his lasting self-reproach it was young Gadley himself, accompanying his employer home from Westminster, who had drawn Mr. Stillwood’s attention to the girl by boxing her ears for having, as he passed, slapped his face with a convenient sprat. Stillwood, acting on the impulse of the moment, had taken the child by the hand and dragged her, unwilling, to her father’s place of business – a small coal shed in the Horseferry Road. The arrangement he there made amounted practically to the purchase of the child. She was sent abroad to school and the coal shed closed. On her return, ten years later, a big, handsome young woman, he married her, and learned at leisure the truth of the old saying, “what’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh,” scrub it and paint it and hide it away under fine clothes as you will.

Her constant complaint against her husband was that he was only a solicitor, a profession she considered vulgar; and nothing “riled” old Gadley more than hearing her views upon this point.

“It’s not fair to the gals,” I once heard her say to him. I was working in the next room, with the door not quite closed, added to which she talked at the top of her voice on all subjects. “What real gentleman, I should like to know, is going to marry the daughter of a City attorney? As I told him years ago, he ought to have retired and gone into the House.”

“The very thing your poor father used to talk of doing whenever things were going a bit queer in the retail coal and potato business,” grunted old Gadley.

Mrs. Stillwood called him a “low beast” in her most aristocratic tones, and swept out of the room.

Not that old Stillwood himself ever expressed fondness for the law.

“I am not at all sure, Kelver,” I remember his saying to me on one occasion, “that you have done wisely in choosing the law. It makes one regard humanity morally as the medical profession regards it physically: – as universally unsound. You suspect everybody of being a rogue. When people are behaving themselves, we lawyers hear nothing of them. All we hear of is roguery, trickery and hypocrisy. It deteriorates the character, Kelver. We live in a perpetual atmosphere of transgression. I sometimes fancy it may be infectious.”

“It does not seem to have infected you, sir,” I replied; for, as I think I have already mentioned, the firm of Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal was held in legal circles as the synonym for rectitude of dealing quite old-fashioned.

“I hope not, Kelver, I hope not,” the old gentleman replied; “and yet, do you know, I sometimes suspect myself – wonder if I may not perhaps be a scamp without realising it. A rogue, you know, Kelver, can always explain himself into an honest man to his own satisfaction. A scamp is never a scamp to himself.”

His words for the moment alarmed me, for, acting on old Gadley’s advice, I had persuaded my mother to put all her small capital into Mr. Stillwood’s hands for re-investment, a transaction that had resulted in substantial increase of our small income. But, looking into his smiling eyes, my momentary fear vanished.

Laughing, he laid his hand upon my shoulder. “One person always be suspicious of, Kelver – yourself. Nobody can do you so much harm as yourself.”

Of Washburn we saw more and more. “Hal” we both called him now, for removing with his gentle, masterful hands my mother’s shyness from about her, he had established himself almost as one of the family, my mother regarding him as she might some absurdly bearded boy entrusted to her care without his knowing it, I looking up to him as to some wonderful elder brother.

“You rest me, Mrs. Kelver,” he would say, lighting his pipe and sinking down into the deep leathern chair that always waited for him in our parlour. “Your even voice, your soft eyes, your quiet hands, they soothe me.”

“It is good for a man,” he would say, looking from one to the other of us through the hanging smoke, “to test his wisdom by two things: the face of a good woman, and the ear of a child – I beg your pardon, Paul – of a young man. A good woman’s face is the white sunlight. Under the gas-lamps who shall tell diamond from paste? Bring it into the sunlight: does it stand that test? Then it is good. And the children! they are the waiting earth on which we fling our store. Is it chaff and dust or living seed? Wait and watch. I shower my thoughts over our Paul, Mrs. Kelver. They seem to me brilliant, deep, original. The young beggar swallows them, forgets them. They were rubbish. Then I say something that dwells with him, that grows. Ah, that was alive, that was a seed. The waiting earth, it can make use only of what is true.”

“You should marry, Hal,” my mother would say. It was her panacea for all mankind.

“I would, Mrs. Kelver,” he answered her on one occasion, “I would to-morrow if I could marry half a dozen women. I should make an ideal husband for half a dozen wives. One I should neglect for five days, and be a burden to upon the sixth.”

From any other than Hal my mother would have taken such a remark, made even in jest, as an insult to her sex. But Hal’s smile was a coating that could sugar any pill.

“I am not one man, Mrs. Kelver, I am half a dozen. If I were to marry one wife she would be married to six husbands. It is too many for any woman to manage.”

“Have you never fallen in love?” asked my mother.

“Three of me have, but on each occasion the other five of me out-voted him.”

“You’re sure six would be sufficient?” queried my mother, smiling.

“Just the right number, Mrs. Kelver. There is one of me must worship, adore a woman madly, abjectly; grovel before her like the Troubadour before his Queen of Song, eat her slipper, drink the water she has washed in, scourge himself before her window, die for a kiss of her glove flung down with a laugh. She must be scornful, contemptuous, cruel. There is another I would cherish, a tender, yielding creature, one whose face would light at my coming, cloud at my going; one to whom I should be a god. There is a third I, a child of Pan – an ugly little beast, Mrs. Kelver; horns on head and hoofs on feet, leering through the wood, seeking its fit mate. And a fourth would wed a wholesome, homely wench, deep of bosom, broad of hip; fit mother of a sturdy brood. A fifth could only be content with a true friend, a comrade wise and witty, a sharer and understander of all joys and thoughts and feelings. And a last, Mrs. Kelver, yearns for a woman pure and sweet, clothed in love and crowned with holiness. Shouldn’t we be a handful, Mrs. Kelver, for any one woman in an eight-roomed house?”

But my mother was not to be discouraged. “You will find the woman one day, Hal, who will be all of them to you – all of them that are worth having, that is. And your eight-roomed house will be a kingdom!”

“A man is many, and a woman but one,” answered Hal.

“That is what men say who are too blind to see more than one side of a woman,” retorted my mother, a little sharply; for the honour and credit of her own sex in all things was very dear to my mother. And indeed this I have learned, that the flag of Womanhood you shall ever find upheld by all true women, flouted only by the false. For a judge in petticoats is ever but a witness in a wig.

Hal laid aside his pipe and leant forward in his chair. “Now tell us, Mrs. Kelver, for our guidance, we two young bachelors, what must the lover of a young girl be?”

Always very serious on this subject of love, my mother answered gravely: “She asks for the whole of a man, Hal, not merely for a sixth, nor any other part of him. She is a child asking for a lover to whom she can look up, who will teach her, guide her, protect her. She is a queen demanding homage, and yet he is her king whom it is her joy to serve. She asks to be his partner, his fellow-worker, his playmate, and at the same time she loves to think of him as her child, her big baby she must take care of. Whatever he has to give she has also to respond with. You need not marry six wives, Hal; you will find your six in one.

“‘As the water to the vessel, woman shapes herself to man;’ an old heathen said that three thousand years ago, and others have repeated him; that is what you mean.”

“I don’t like that way of putting it,” answered my mother. “I mean that as you say of man, so in every true woman is contained all women. But to know her completely you must love her with all love.”

Sometimes the talk would be of religion, for my mother’s faith was no dead thing that must be kept ever sheltered from the air, lest it crumble.

One evening “Who are we that we should live?” cried Hal. “The spider is less cruel; the very pig less greedy, gluttonous and foul; the tiger less tigerish; our cousin ape less monkeyish. What are we but savages, clothed and ashamed, nine-tenths of us?”

“But Sodom and Gomorrah,” reminded him my mother, “would have been spared for the sake of ten just men.”

“Much more sensible to have hurried the ten men out, leaving the remainder to be buried with all their abominations under their own ashes,” growled Hal.

“And we shall be purified,” continued my mother, “the evil in us washed away.”

“Why have made us ill merely to mend us? If the Almighty were so anxious for our company, why not have made us decent in the beginning?” He had just come away from a meeting of Poor Law Guardians, and was in a state of dissatisfaction with human nature generally.

“It is His way,” answered my mother. “The precious stone lies hid in clay. He has His purpose.”

“Is the stone so very precious?”

“Would He have taken so much pains to fashion it if it were not? You see it all around you, Hal, in your daily practice – heroism, self-sacrifice, love stronger than death. Can you think He will waste it, He who uses again even the dead leaf?”

“Shall the new leaf remember the new flower?”

“Yes, if it ever knew it. Shall memory be the only thing to die?”

Often of an evening I would accompany Hal upon his rounds. By the savage tribe he both served and ruled he had come to be regarded as medicine man and priest combined. He was both their tyrant and their slave, working for them early and late, yet bullying them unmercifully, enforcing his commands sometimes with vehement tongue, and where that would not suffice with quick fists; the counsellor, helper, ruler, literally of thousands. Of income he could have made barely enough to live upon; but few men could have enjoyed more sense of power; and that I think it was that held him to the neighbourhood.

“Nature laid me by and forgot me for a couple of thousand years,” was his own explanation of himself. “Born in my proper period, I should have climbed to chieftainship upon uplifted shields. I might have been an Attila, an Alaric. Among the civilised one can only climb by crawling, and I am too impatient to crawl. Here I am king at once by force of brain and muscle.” So in Poplar he remained, poor in fees but rich in honour.

The love of justice was a passion with him. The oppressors of the poor knew and feared him well. Injustice once proved before him, vengeance followed sure. If the law would not help, he never hesitated to employ lawlessness, of which he could always command a satisfactory supply. Bumble might have the Board of Guardians at his back, Shylock legal support for his pound of flesh; but sooner or later the dark night brought punishment, a ducking in dock basin or canal, “Brutal Assault Upon a Respected Resident” (according to the local papers), the “miscreants” always making and keeping good their escape, for he was an admirable organiser.

One night it seemed to him necessary that a child should go at once into the Infirmary.

“It ain’t no use my taking her now,” explained the mother, “I’ll only get bullyragged for disturbing ‘em. My old man was carried there three months ago when he broke his leg, but they wouldn’t take him in till the morning.”

“Oho! oho! oho!” sang Hal, taking the child up in his arms and putting on his hat. “You follow me; we’ll have some sport. Tally ho! tally ho!” And away we went, Hal heading our procession through the streets, shouting a rollicking song, the baby staring at him openmouthed.

“Now ring,” cried Hal to the mother on our reaching the Workhouse gate. “Ring modestly, as becomes the poor ringing at the gate of Charity.” And the bell tinkled faintly.

“Ring again!” cried Hal, drawing back into the shadow; and at last the wicket opened.

“Oh, if you please, sir, my baby – ”

“Blast your baby!” answered a husky voice, “what d’ye mean by coming here this time of night?”

“Please, sir, I’m afraid it’s dying, and the Doctor – ”

The man was no sentimentalist, and to do him justice made no hypocritical pretence of being one. He consigned the baby and its mother and the doctor to Hell, and the wicket would have closed but for the point of Hal’s stick.

“Open the gate!” roared Hal. It was idle pretending not to hear Hal anywhere within half a mile of him when he filled his lungs for a cry. “Open it quick, you blackguard! You gross vat-load of potato spirit, you – ”

That the Governor should speak a language familiar to the governed was held by the Romans, born rulers of men, essential to authority. This theory Hal also maintained. His command of idiom understanded by his people was one of his rods of power. In less time than it took the trembling porter to loosen the bolts, Hal had presented him with a word picture of himself, as seen by others, that must have lessened his self-esteem.

“I didn’t know as it was you, Doctor,” explained the man.

“No, you thought you had only to deal with some helpless creature you could bully. Stir your fat carcass, you ugly cur! I’m in a hurry.”

The House Surgeon was away, but an attendant or two were lounging about, unfortunately for themselves, for Hal, being there, took it upon himself to go round the ward setting crooked things straight; and a busy and alarming time they had of it. Not till a couple of hours later did he fling himself forth again, having enjoyed himself greatly.

A gentleman came to reside in the district, a firm believer in the wisdom of the couplet: “A woman, a spaniel and a walnut tree, The more you beat them the better they be.” The spaniel and the walnut tree he did not possess, so his wife had the benefit of his undivided energies. Whether his treatment had improved her morally, one cannot say; her evident desire to do her best may have been natural or may have been assisted; but physically it was injuring her. He used to beat her about the head with his strap, his argument being that she always seemed half asleep, and that this, for the time being, woke her up. Sympathisers brought complaint to Hal, for the police in that neighbourhood are to keep the streets respectable. With the life in the little cells that line them they are no more concerned than are the scavengers of the sewers with the domestic arrangements of the rats.

“What’s he like?” asked Hal.

“He’s a big ‘un,” answered the woman who had come with the tale, “and he’s good with his fists – I’ve seen him. But there’s no getting at him. He’s the sort to have the law on you if you interfere with him, and she’s the sort to help him.”

“Any likely time to catch him at it?” asked Hal.

“Saturdays it’s as regular as early closing,” answered the woman, “but you might have to wait a bit.”

“I’ll wait in your room, granny, next Saturday,” suggested Hal.

“All right,” agreed the woman, “I’ll risk it, even if I do get a bloody head for it.”

So that week end we sat very still on two rickety chairs listening to a long succession of sharp, cracking sounds that, had one not known, one might have imagined produced by some child monotonously exploding percussion caps, each one followed by an answering groan. Hal never moved, but sat smoking his pipe, an ugly smile about his mouth. Only once he opened his lips, and then it was to murmur to himself: “And God blessed them and said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply.”

The horror ceased at last, and later we heard the door unlock and a man’s foot upon the landing above. Hal beckoned to me, and swiftly we slipped out and down the creaking stairs. He opened the front door, and we waited in the evil-smelling little passage. The man came towards us whistling. He was a powerfully built fellow, rather good-looking, I remember. He stopped abruptly upon catching sight of Hal, who stood crouching in the shadow of the door.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Waiting to pull your nose!” answered Hal, suiting the action to the word. And then laughing he ran down the street, I following.

The man gave chase, calling to us with a string of imprecations to stop. But Hal only ran the faster, though after a street or two he slackened, and the man gained on us a little.

So we continued, the distance between us and our pursuer now a little more, now a little less. People turned and stared at us. A few boys, scenting grim fun, followed shouting for awhile; but these we soon out-paced, till at last in deserted streets, winding among warehouses bordering the river, we three ran alone, between long, lifeless walls. I looked into Hal’s face from time to time, and he was laughing; but every now and then he would look over his shoulder at the man behind him still following doggedly, and then his face would be twisted into a comically terrified grimace. Turning into a narrow cul-de-sac, Hal suddenly ducked behind a wide brick buttress, and the man, still running, passed us. And then Hal stood up and called to him, and the man turned, looked into Hal’s eyes, and understood.

He was not a coward. Besides, even a rat when cornered will fight for its life. He made a rush at Hal, and Hal made no attempt to defend himself. He stood there laughing, and the man struck him full in the face, and the blood spurted out and flowed down into his mouth. The man came on again, though terror was in every line of his face, all his desire being to escape. But this time Hal drove him back again. They fought for awhile, if one can call it fighting, till the man, mad for air, reeled against the wall, stood there quivering convulsively, his mouth wide open, resembling more than anything else some huge dying fish. And Hal drew away and waited.

I have no desire to see again the sight I saw that quiet, still evening, framed by those high, windowless walls, from behind which sounded with ceaseless regularity the gentle swish of the incoming tide. All sense of retribution was drowned in the sight of Hal’s evident enjoyment of his sport. The judge had disappeared, leaving the work to be accomplished by a savage animal loosened for the purpose.

The wretched creature flung itself again towards its only door of escape, fought with the vehemence of despair, to be flung back again, a hideous, bleeding mass of broken flesh. I tried to cling to Hal’s arm, but one jerk of his steel muscles flung me ten feet away.

“Keep off, you fool!” he cried. “I won’t kill him. I’m keeping my head. I shall know when to stop.” And I crept away and waited.

Hal joined me a little later, wiping the blood from his face. We made our way to a small public-house near the river, and from there Hal sent a couple of men on whom he could rely with instructions how to act. I never heard any more of the matter. It was a subject on which I did not care to speak to Hal. I can only hope that good came of it.