This Is the End — Part 03

"We will start on our quest to-morrow," said Anonyma.

"To-day I must work."

Nobody in Anonyma's circle was ever allowed to forget that she spent four hours a week in the service of her country.

You would never guess how much insight into the souls of the poor, four hours a week can give to a person like Anonyma.

She had written two books about the Brown Borough since the outbreak of War.

The provincial Press had been much impressed by their vivid picture of slum realities.

Anonyma's poor were always yearning, yearning to be understood and loved by a ministering upper class, yearning for light, for art, for self-expression, for novels by high-souled ladies.

The atmosphere of Anonyma's fiction was thick with yearning.

Anonyma always came home from her Work with what she called "word-vignettes" in her notebook.

She gave her Family the benefit of these during the rest of the week, besides fitting them into her books.

So that although Cousin Gustus always conscientiously bought a dozen copies of each novel as it came out, he really wasted his money, for he was obliged to know all his wife's copy by heart before it got into print.

By speaking each thought as well as writing it, Anonyma rather unfairly won a reputation twice over with the same material.

Anonyma produced a vignette now, in order to show how necessary it was that she should hurry to her yearning flock.

"I came into the room of one of my sailors' wives last week, and I found her with a baby sobbing on her breast, and an empty hearth at her feet.

I

thought of the eternal tragedy of womanhood.

I said, 'Will my love help, my dear?'

" There was a pause, and Cousin Gustus sighed.

"What did she say?"

asked Kew, without expecting an answer from the artist.

After all, a word-vignette is not intended to have a sequel.

It is supposed to fall complete with a little splash into your silent understanding.

I must say Kew was rather tiresome in refusing to be content with the splash.

"So few women really understand how to stop a child crying," said Cousin Gustus, speaking from bitter and universal experience.

"That's the point," said Kew.

"The child had probably swallowed a pin."

It generally breaks my heart to hear a story spoilt, but with Anonyma's word-vignettes I did not mind, because they were told as true, and yet they did not ring true.

I must tell you that Anonyma had married into a family of accomplished white liars, and to them the ring of truth was as unmistakable as the dinner-bell.

Few people could lie successfully to Kew or Jay, they knew that art from the inside.

White lies are easily justified, but almost any lie can be whitewashed.

Apart from the mutual attitude of Kew and Jay, who possessed something between them that might be called good faith, there was hardly any trust included in that family relationship.

Cousin Gustus distrusted youth.

He thought young people were always either lying to him or laughing at him, and indeed they often were.

Only not so often as he thought.

He was no prop on which to repose confidence, and it was very easy both to tell him lies and not to tell him facts.

Mrs. Gustus had no gift of intimacy.

She was reserved about everything except herself, or what she believed to be herself.

The self that she shared so generously with others was, however, not founded on fact, but modelled on the heroine of all her books.

She killed her heroine whenever possible--I think she only once married her,--yet still the creature remained immortal in Mrs. Gustus's public personality.

She concealed or transformed everything that did not seem artistic.

Her notebook was a tangle of self-deceptions.

The rest of the Family knew this.

They never pretended to believe her.

Kew and Jay were skilled romancers, fact was clay in their hands.

Nobody had ever taught them such a dull lesson as exact truthfulness.

If they built the bare bones of their structures fairly accurately, they placed the whole in an artificial light, altering in some effective way the spirit of the facts.

Education had impressed the importance of technical truthfulness on Kew.

But he was a quick talker, and in order to keep him in line with his tongue, nature had made him quick of wit, quick in argument, and unconsciously quick in making and seeing loopholes for escape.

He was at present perfectly comfortable in his anomalous position regarding a search round the sea-coast for a Jay he knew to be in the Brown Borough.

"If I am going to work, I must go," said Anonyma.

"Russ and I will go together as far as the Underground."

She looked at herself in the glass.

The scarlet bird in her hat had an arresting expression.

As she was putting on her gloves she said, "I'm sorry, Kew, about your disappointment, not finding Nana at home last night.

But I told you so."

She had no fear of this much-shunned phrase.

"Never mind," said Kew mildly.

"We'll put Christina on the track to-morrow."

Mr. Russell said a polite Good-bye to his Hound, and accompanied his friend Anonyma to the Underground.

That was a fateful little journey for him.

As he turned from Anonyma's side at the bookstall, he noticed a 'bus positively beckoning to him.

It had a lady conductor, and she was poised expectantly, one hand on the bell and the other beckoning to Mr. Russell.

His nature was docile, and the 'bus was bound for Chancery Lane, his destination.

He mounted the 'bus.

I need hardly tell you that a 'bus that makes deliberate advances to the public is the rarest sight in London.

The self-respecting 'bus looks upon the public as dust beneath its tyres.

Even a Brigadier-General with red tabs, on his way to Whitehall, looks pathetically humble waggling his cane at a 'bus.

All 'bus-drivers have a kingly look; it comes from their proud position.

The rest of the world is only worthy to communicate with that noble race by means of nods and becks and wreathed smiles.

"Chancery Lane, please," said Mr. Russell.

"But why did you stop specially for me?"

"I thought your wife hailed me, sir," lied the 'bus-conductor.

Any allusion to his wife mildly annoyed Mr. Russell.

"Not my wife," he said.

"Merely a friend."

"Oh, I _beg_ your pardon, sir," said the 'bus-conductor, and underlined the "beg" with the ting of her ticket-puncher.

She was rather a darling 'bus-conductor, because she was also Jay.

She had a short, though not a fat face, soft eyes, and very soft hair cut short to just below the lobes of her ears.

A gentleman with dingy but elaborate boot-uppers hailed and mounted the 'bus.

"Shufftesbury Uvvenue?"

he asked.

He said it that way, of course, because he was a Shakespearian actor.

The 'bus-conductor gave him his ticket, and then took her stand upon her platform, more or less unaware that Mr. Russell and the actor, both next to the door and opposite to each other, were looking at her with a pleased look.

Mr. Russell thought for some time, and then he said, "'T's a b'tiful day."

"That's what it is," replied the 'bus-conductor.

"I wonder if it's wrong to enjoy being a 'bus-conductor?"

"I shouldn't think so," said Mr. Russell cautiously.

"Why?"

The 'bus-conductor waved her hand towards a State hint that shouted in letters six foot high from an opposite wall: "DON'T USE A MOTOR CAR FOR PLEASURE."

Mr. Russell read it very carefully and said nothing.

"This is a motor car," observed the 'bus-conductor, glancing at her inaccessible chauffeur.

"And as for pleasure ..."

The high houses rose out of the earth like Alps, and the roar in the morning was like large music.

She knew she had been an Olympian in a recent life, because she found herself familiar with greater and more gorgeous speed than any 'bus attains, and with the divine discords that high mountains and high cities sing.

"I hope it's not wrong, because I'm going on a motor tour to-morrow," said Mr. Russell.

"On business of a sort, and yet also on pleasure.

On a search, as a matter of fact."

"Oh, any search is pleasure," said the bus-conductor.

"Especially if it's an abstract search."

"'Tisn't," said Mr. Russell.

"'T's a search for a person."

The 'bus-conductor looked at the sky.

"And are Anonyma and Kew going too?"

she thought.

You must bear in mind that she had deliberately plucked him from the side of Anonyma.

"Perhaps any pleasure is wrong in these days," she said.

"Come, come," said the actor.

"Whut's wrung with these days?

A German ship sunk yesterday.

Thut's pleasurable enough."

The 'bus-conductor turned a cold eye upon him.

"I can cheer, but not laugh over such news as that," she said pompously.

"Doesn't even a German find the sea bitter to drown in?

An English woman or a German butcher, isn't it all the same when it comes to a Me, with a throat full of water?

Hasn't a German got a Me?"

The actor looked at his boot-uppers.

Mr. Russell thought.

Shufftesbury Uvvenue arrived soon, and the actor alighted with some relief.

When the 'bus started again, the bus-conductor said, "Don't you think the only way you can get pleasure out of it all is by treating life as a bead upon a string?"

"That's a sufficient way, surely," said Mr. Russell.

"If you can truly reach it."

In the Strand he asked, "May I come in this 'bus again?"

"This is a public 'bus," observed the 'bus-conductor.

"This is Monday," said Mr. Russell.

"May I gather that during this week your 'bus will be passing Kensington Church at half-past eleven every morning?"

The 'bus-conductor did not answer.

She went to the top of the 'bus to say, "Fezz plizz."

Mr. Russell thought so furiously that he was only roused by the sound of St. Paul's striking apparently several dozen in his immediate vicinity.

"This is Ludgate Hill.

I only paid you as far as Chancery Lane.

I owe you another halfpenny," said Mr. Russell.

"A penny," said the 'bus-conductor.

As he disappeared she thought, "There is something remarkable about that man.

I wish I hadn't been so prosy.

I wonder where and why Anonyma picked him up."

When Mr. Russell came home that evening, he said, "I met--" "Isn't it wonderful--the people and the things one meets?"

said Mrs. Gustus.

"I met to-day a child with nothing but one garment on, rolling like a sparrow in the dust.

The one garment, I thought, was the only drawback in the scene.

Why can't we get back to simplicity?"

Mr. Russell, on second thoughts, was glad he had been interrupted.

He did not feel discouraged, only he decided not to try again.

His Hound jumped on to his knee and put a paw into his hand.

"I also persuaded a woman to give up drink," continued Mrs. Gustus.

"I put it to her on the ground of simplicity.

She was in bed, having been drunk the night before, and I sat on her bed with my hand on hers.

I

said, 'Dear fellow-woman, there are no essentials in life but bread and water and love.

Everything else is a sort of skin-disease which has appeared on the surface of Nature, a disease which we call civilization.'

She cried bitterly, and I gathered that she was lacking in all three essentials.

I went and bought her four loaves of bread, on condition she would promise never to touch intoxicants again.

I said I would not go away until she promised.

She promised.

I left her still crying."

Cousin Gustus sighed.

He never went about himself, and only saw the world through his wife's eyes.

This did not tend to cure his pessimism.

"It is wonderful how one can reach the bed-rock of life in two hours among the poor and simple," said Mrs. Gustus.

"By the way, I only put in two hours to-day, because I think I can do better work in two hours twice a week than in four hours once.

So I shall come up for the afternoon one day this week from wherever we are by then, and leave you three men prostrate on some shore, with your ears to Nature, like a child's ear to a shell."

She groped for her notebook.

"I must come up now and then too," said Mr. Russell, and poked his Hound secretly in the ribs.

* * * * * I can't tell you what countless miles away his 'bus-conductor was by now.

A certain fraction of her, to be sure, was sitting in the dark room at Number Eighteen Mabel Place, Brown Borough, with fierce hands pinching the table-cloth, and a hot forehead on the table.

All day long the thirst for a secret journey had been in her throat.

All day long the elaborate tangle of London had made difficult her way, but she had kicked aside the snare now, and her free feet were on the step of the House by the Sea.

No voices met her at the door, the hall was empty.

The firelight pencilled in gold the edges of the wooden figure that presided over the stairs.

I think I told you about that figure.

I never knew whose it was--a saint's I think, but her virtuous expression was marred by her broken nose, and the finger with which she had once pointed to Heaven was also broken.

Her figure was rather stiff, and so were her draperies, which fell in straight folds to her blocklike feet.

Her right hand was raised high, and her left was held alertly away from her side and had unseparated fingers.

She had seen a great procession of generations pass her pedestal, but she never saw Jay.

Of course not, for Jay was not there.

Only a column of thin watching air haunted the House.

There are many ghosts that haunt the House by the Sea.

Jay is, of course, one of them, and for this reason she knows more about ghosts than any one I know.

Fragments of untold stories are familiar to her.

She knows how you may hear in the dark a movement by your bed, and fling out your hand and feel it grasped, and then feel the grasp slide up from your hand to your shoulder, from your shoulder to your throat, from your throat to your heart.

She knows how you may go between trees in the moonlight to meet your friend, and find suddenly that some one is keeping pace with you, and how you, mistaking this companion for your friend, may say some silly greeting that only your friend understands.

And how your heart drops as you hear the first breath of the reply.

She knows how, walking in the mid-day streets of London, you may cross the path of some Great One who had a prior right by many thousand years to walk beside the Thames.

These are the ghost stories that never get told.

Few people can read them between the lines of press accounts of inquests, or in the dignified announcements of the failure of hearts, on the front page of the _Morning Post_.

But Jay knows, because of her intimacy with the House by the Sea.

There she meets her fellow-ghosts.

The House, as I told you, has hardly any garden; having the sea, it doesn't need one.

But there is a little formal place about twenty paces across, set, as it were, in the heart of the House.

A small prim square, bounded on the north, south and east by the House itself, and on the west by the cliff and the sea.

There is a stone balustrade to divide the garden from space.

In the middle of the square is a stone basin with becalmed water-lilies and of course goldfish.

Round the basin the orderly ranks of little clipped box hedges manoeuvre.

The untamed elements in the garden are the climbing things, they sing in gold and yellow and orange and red from the walls.

The only official way into the garden is a door from the House, a bald door without eyebrows, so to speak, like all the doors and windows in the House.

But there is an unofficial way into the garden, and Jay found her Secret Friend there.

This is the short cut to the sea.

In other words, it is a wriggly ladder, one end of which you attach to a hook in the wall, and the other you throw over the balustrade down the cliff to the sea.

It is a long way to walk round the House and along the cliff and down to the sea by the path.

And just as the house-agents always want to be one minute and a half from the church and the post-office, so we in the Secret House cannot afford to be more than a minute and a half from the sea.

The Secret Friend was there, and he was gazing so earnestly down the cliff that his hair was hanging forward most unbeautifully, and he was rather red in the face.

He was looking at a little boat which was on its way towards the foot of the wriggly ladder.

A schooner with the low sun climbing down her rigging breathed on the breathing sea not far away.

The tide was high.

The oars of the little boat suddenly wavered and were paralysed.

One of the rowers made a quick movement with his hand.

"It's the Law," said the Secret Friend, and he tried spasmodically to extinguish the sun with his hand.

"It's the Law.

The man with the tall and dewy brow."

The Law, in a fat officious-looking boat, came sneaking round the near point of the cliff.

The air was so still, and the sea so calm, that you could hear the sides of the boat grate against the cliff.

And the air was so clear that you could see the tall and dewy brow of the Law, as he stood up and discovered the wriggly ladder.

"To have a face like that," said the Secret Friend, "is to challenge fate.

It makes me sick."

"What is this?"

asked the Law, although there seemed little doubt that the thing was a wriggly ladder.

No one answered; so the Law rowed to the foot of the thing in question.

The Secret Friend jerked it up about six feet, and secured it so.

The Law cleared its throat, and looked nervously at the schooner, and at the sun, and at the other boat, and at the Secret Friend.

The Law likes to be argued with.

Take away words and where is the Law?

Silence always annoys it.

Yet there was no silence in the Secret World.

I remember how the roses sang, and how the sea mourned over the confusion of its gentle dreams.

The knocking of the slow sea upon the cliff seemed like the ticking of the great clock that is our world.

It was a night when every horizon had heaven calling from the other side.

The Story went on....

* * * * * It was Chloris who brought Jay back to Number Eighteen Mabel Place, Brown Borough.

Chloris gave an unromantic snort and sat with unnecessary clumsiness upon Jay's toe.

So Jay returned, falling suddenly out of the music of the sea into the band-of-hopeful music of distant Boy Scouts on the march.

Number Eighteen Mabel Place is not, as a rule, a hopeful place to return to.

Jay and I know quite well what Satan felt like when he was expelled from Heaven.

So Jay, whose refuge from most ills was talk, went to see a friend.

She had many friends in the Brown Borough, and most of them were what Mrs. Gustus would call "undeserving."

Mrs. Gustus has a very high mind; she and the C. O.

S.

are dreadfully grown-up institutions, I think; they forget what it feels like to have a good rampageous kick against the pricks.

Nearly everybody in the Brown Borough enjoys a kick once a week (on pay-day)--and some of us go on kicking all our lives.

At any rate, the Brown Borough is peopled with babies young and old, and high minds and grown-up institutions are apt to look over heads.

Jay had a low mind and walked about on the Brown Borough level.

"I have got neuralgia," said Jay to Chloris, "my hat feels too tight.

My head feels like _tête de veau farcie_.

I shall go and talk to Mrs. 'Ero Edwards."

And so she did, and found that Mrs. 'Ero Edwards had been wanting to see her to tell her that the war would be over in June, and that the Edwards's nephew knew on the best authority that the Kaser couldn't get no kipper to his breakfast any more because Preserdink Wilson was a-holding of them up upon the high seas, and that Jimmy Wragge was "wanted" for "helping himself," and that young Dusty Morgan, the lodger, had gone for a soldier, and his wife had taken his job as driver of a van.

"There's only two jobs now," said Mrs. 'Ero Edwards, "wot you never see a woman doin', and one's a burglar, an' the other's a scarecrow."

Jay said, "The lady burglars would be so clever they'd never get into the papers, and the lady scarecrows would be so attractive that they'd fascinate the birds."

And then Mrs. 'Ero Edwards considered what she would say to an 'Un if she had him here, and Jay was called upon to provide 'Unnish replies in the 'Unnish lingo.

Her German was so patriotically rusty that she could think of no better retorts than "Nicht hinauslehnen," or "Bitte nicht zu rauchen," or "Heisses Wasser, bitte," or "Wacht am Rhein," or "Streng verboten."

Yet the dramatic effect of the interview was very good indeed, and Mrs. 'Ero Edwards's arguments were unanswerable in any tongue.

And then they thought they would make a surprise for young Mrs. Dusty Morgan, the lodger, against she come back from work, because she was that down'earted.

So they went and bought some ribbon to tie up the curtains, and some flowers for the table, and put the chairs in happy and new attitudes of expectancy, and cleaned the windows, putting a piece of white paper on the broken pane instead of the rag, which was rather weary of its job.

And then Mrs. 'Ero Edwards confided to Jay that young Mrs. Dusty wanted very much to find the picture of a real tip-top soldier, so that she might look at it and remember how this business was going to make a man of young Dusty.

And Jay went all the way to the City and could find no picture of a tip-top soldier, and then she came back to the Brown Borough, and because of the intervention of Providence, found Albrecht Dürer's "St. George" second-hand in a Jew-shop.

And they hung it up over the mantelpiece, and decided that it was rather like Dusty, if it wasn't for the uniform.

And the general effect was so superb that Jay nearly spoilt it all by jumping a hole in the floor, so as to jog Time's elbow and bring Mrs. Dusty home quickly to see it all.

It was a very delicate floor.

Jay always jumped when she was impatient.

She did everything with double fervour, and where you or I would have stamped one foot, she stamped two at once.

Mrs. Dusty Morgan came back a little bit drunk.

When she saw the Saint over the mantelpiece she cried, and blasted the war that made it necessary to wear them ...

respirators all over (the Saint is in armour),--and when she saw the flowers, she laughed, and said it seemed like Nothing-on-Earth to have Dusty away.

Oh, bend your eyes, nor send your glance about.

Oh, watch your feet, nor stray beyond the kerb.

Oh, bind your heart lest it find secrets out.

For thus no punishment Of magic shall disturb Your very great content.

Oh, shut your lips to words that are forbidden.

Oh, throw away your sword, nor think to fight.

Seek not the best, the best is better hidden.

Thus need you have no fear, No terrible delight Shall cross your path, my dear.