Chapter XII

[Henry Gastonard tells of a visit to his cousin, the Rev. Arthur Warrington, at Lowestoft.]

Hotel Metropole, Lowestoft,
July 31st, 1905.

Dear Paddy,--The late Douglas Jerrold remarked that he doted upon the sea--from the beach. It seemed yesterday that the sea doted upon me when it rolled me like a barrel in my bunk and moved me to appeal to high heaven for immediate annihilation. The passage across was about as dirty as a Channel passage can be--and that, as you know, you who are fond of singing the glories of the deep (when you are on shore) is a shade which blackest night cannot surpass.

I made no stay in London save to dine and to sleep at the Carlton. The hansom which drove me across Trafalgar Square showed me no amazing novelty, nor was I long enough in the city to find the place much changed. It is true that there is now a fine bit of life and colour where once the dingy old Pavilion stood--for I visited the new building after dinner--and Leicester Square seems less shabby than formerly; but a man who comes over from Paris is rarely amazed by anything that London can show him, and admits her later day claims reluctantly. In one matter alone do I find a real advance, and that is the newer hotels, which, I venture to think, are just about as good as any in Europe.

You did not answer my last letter--possibly because of your indignation; it may be because of your want of interest. A man who is playing golf by the seashore (for I am convinced you are there) cares little for the fact that his neighbour is in a bunker, and less for the means by which he may extract himself therefrom. Nor do I expect the Paddy of old time to be changed very much from that Hector who has washed his hands of me upon more than one occasion, and is quite ready to do so again when my letters have made him angry enough. You think that I am playing a fool’s game, Paddy, and your silence bears witness to the fact. So be it--until we gather scalps together at Portmarnock, and I play you for your boots, which, most likely, are unpaid for.

You should know that Jules Farman’s information sent me to London, and from London pell-mell to the East Coast of England, where I am to find Mimi the Simpleton among a company of clowns, and to withdraw her immediately from that humorous if unwashed society. If Farman is to be believed, the girl left us deliberately at Poissy, met an old comrade of the Fêtes upon the outskirts of Paris, joined his troupe immediately; and having acquired the distinction of dancing a Spanish dance which is not Spanish, and of playing upon a guitar which is no guitar at all, set out with certain vagrants of the city to amuse the desperadoes of the outskirts and their obliging families.

This company appears to have prospered for a little while, and then to have been drowned, partly by drink and partly by the winds of adversity. It broke up at Rheims, sent straggling members on to Brussels, there fell in with an Englishman of enterprise, was re-organised by him and wafted over to our native country where upon the sandy shore or the less accommodating shingle it amuses the prosperous of suburbia and bears witness once more to the smallness of this terrestrial globe and the fertile resource of its inhabitants.

Admit with me, my dear Paddy, that there is something wonderfully fine in this superb independence. Reflect upon the homes you know, the motherhood there, the gregarious instincts of childhood, the bonds binding even the most wretched--do this, and then put side by side with it the life and actions of such a child as Mimi the Simpleton. She has not known a home these many years. She cannot have the remotest idea of the meaning of motherhood. The streets of a city have taught her the great lessons of self-reliance and of self-help. She is not afraid to be alone. All the terrors which inflict the man of substance, bills payable and bills due, the rise or fall of values, doubts concerning the future, the perils of ambition, the bitterness of loss, these have no meaning for Mimi the Simpleton. Let the sun shine and she will laugh. Give her bread and coffee and she has the riches of Crœsus. Take her to a café, where the lights dance and the fiddles are busy, and you are opening to her the floodgates of Paradise. Fortune is powerless against armour such as this. What matters it if the bread be lacking to-day--will not to-morrow be more generous? Who shall complain that the sun sets in a cloud, when he will rise in splendour at dawn?

You may ask me, Paddy, how it comes to be, if this be Mimi’s creed of life, that I would intrude upon it with a more exacting philosophy or a friendship that is critical? I shall not attempt to answer these questions. I am drawn to this child, I know not by what spell. It is not love, as men commonly employ that word. I do not seek, be sure of it, to put shame upon her, or to ask her to be the instrument of passion. But she has become necessary to my life. The vagrancy of the years has brought me to this, that there is just one other vagrant upon the road with whom I would share the wigwam, just one other little comrade who must help me to light the camp fire and to watch by it when the sun has set. To this end I am pursuing Mimi upon this Eastern strand. To this selfish purpose I am about to command that she shall cast off the Spaniards and remember the lessons of yesterday. She may refuse or she may consent--but I shall pursue the issue if necessary through the years.

Accompany me, then, to this “gay” resort; follow me to the sandy shore of Lowestoft; but particularly, my dear Paddy, to the temporary home of my cousin, Arthur Warrington, who is here as a _locum tenens_, and has already fascinated a large number of females and a smaller (a much smaller) number of pious males. Arthur, I must admit, was not as pleased as he might have been to see me. The exclamation that he uttered was not altogether ecclesiastical, nor do I choose to remember it; but it did not imply welcome, not as you and I understand the word. When he had recovered the shock, he confessed to me that he believed me to be dying in Paris, and was naturally much relieved to find that his alarms were groundless.

“I think you wrote me to that effect, Arthur,” said I. “If I did not reply to your letter, pray forgive me.”

“Oh,” says he, blushing to the roots of his beautiful auburn hair, “I do not think that I wrote, Henry--I had not your address--but we were both distressed, greatly distressed, I will say.”

“Well,” said I, “you seem to have been worrying, Arthur--but say no more about it; for here I am as sound as a smacksman and as hungry. What’s more, I have come to stop with you for a week or two if you will have me, which, if I remember your invitations correctly, is a pleasure you have been looking forward to for a long time. Now, isn’t it, Arthur? or am I mistaken?”

Well, he stammered and stuttered again, and was in the middle of a parable about the green room and the pink room, when in comes cousin Martha, who is one of the jolliest little women in Suffolk and as clever a flirt as ever was yoked to a parson’s cassock. Be sure Martha had her lord and master down in a minute and was trampling upon him in two. What! to turn their own flesh and blood into the streets--who ever heard of such a thing! Of course I must stay with them. And wouldn’t I be useful, too! She thought of that in a minute.

“Don’t you know we’re to have a Pageant here,” says she, “of course you paj, Henry?”

“Of course,” said I, “anything that you tell me to do is done immediately, Martha. Shall we paj now or await a more solitary occasion?”

She expressed some confusion at this, and hastened to explain that they were about to have a Pageant at Lowestoft in which they would celebrate the early arrival of the Danes in England and the glorious victories of Queen Boadicea. There were to be real Norsemen and real ships--to say nothing of bloody fights on the foreshore and the gathering of the clans upon such heights as this land of marsh and marigolds can command.

“Arthur is to be a monk,” says she. “Of course he will be a Protestant monk, but he will wear sandals and shave his hair. I am to play a British maiden, Harry. I shall wear a bearskin upon my shoulders and dye my hair red--now don’t you think it will look beautiful?”

I assured her that nothing could be finer; and “as for the reputation of the late Mrs. Astley of glorious memory, whose hair was to be wrapped about her feet whenever she stooped to the earth to do it, that,” said I, “is already perished.”

This flattery was by no means unwelcome to cousin Martha. She told me that they were having great trouble with the townsfolk, who had entered into the fray almost with too much spirit--especially a local vendor of wines, who wanted to play a modern monk Roger and to roll kegs of beer down the hills to the sea. There were many candidates, I discovered, for the maidens’ parts, especially such maidens as were to be carried in the arms of the barbarians. Not less popular was the office of Druid, who would cut the mistletoe provided by the Army and Navy Stores and generally conduct the sacred rites as tradition and Christmas have sanctioned them.

“And what do you do, Arthur?” I asked the parson, “and what, if you please, is a Protestant monk? Forgive the ignorance which remembers so little history. Of course it is a showy part, or they would not have asked you to play it. You were always a bit of an actor, weren’t you, cousin? Don’t you remember when you came out to us at Bordeaux, that little Mademoiselle Charcot who----”

He exclaimed, “Hush, hush!”--it is astonishing how rarely a cleric is tolerant of reminiscences--and when my cousin little Martha implored me to tell her the whole story, Arthur silenced her immediately by an answer to my previous question.

“A Protestant monk is one who carried the evangels before the days of the Papacy----”

“Then against what did he protest, Arthur?”

“Against the pagan intolerance of his day--just as we protest in our own time against the pagan intolerance of the social world. I intend to show the people that their vices are not changed from those of fifteen hundred years ago----”

“What a lively business. Do you have a band?”

“It is not seemly to jest upon such a subject, Henry.”

“Oh, I know it--pray forgive me. Of course you are quite right. The old gods are far from done with yet. Venus, I think, still gets an engagement occasionally, and Janus is often looked in the face by the morning papers. I admit that there is still something to be said for bearskins, while caves should be a godsend to the man who has just come down from Carey-street. Why don’t some of you parsons set us an example? Sell that thou hast--especially your brewery shares, Arthur--and live in a cave. I’ll bet you what you like that cousin Martha in a bearskin would fill your church every Sunday though half the bishops in England were at the shop opposite.”

“The shop, Henry! Has Paris taught you to call a church a shop?”

“In Paris, my dear Arthur, there are no monks. The Government has done the protesting.”

“For the good of France, undoubtedly. The pure religion.”

“Your religion, Arthur--but look here, I’m not out for a theological argument. Let us talk of the Pageant. What does Martha suggest that I should play?”

“Would you like to be a knight in armour, Harry, and buy your own armour?”

“That’s a generous proposal, Martha. Did knights in armour come over with the Danes?”

“Oh, dear, no--I had forgotten that. Suppose you were a Norseman with beautiful long hair----”

“To match yours, Martha? Arthur wouldn’t like that.”

“But a Norseman was such a splendid creature. You would have to speak in a guttural voice, Harry, and carry a scimitar.”

“It sounds well, Martha; but I should prefer the cellarer’s part. I could look after the wine vats very well. If that’s not it, how would you like me to play Henry the Eighth on the Field of the Cloth of Gold? I could get the costumes from Fox’s; and I tell you what, if you want any humour, I’ll drive on to the course in my motor car.”

Arthur raised his eyes to heaven at this, while Martha seemed not a little affronted. They were both very serious about this business, poor dears, and not a little concerned for its success. To pacify them, I fell in with the Norseman idea, and then sat down to tea.

You can have no idea, Paddy, of the meaning of these pageants to country towns, or of the enthusiasm they excite. People are in and out of this house every ten minutes to consult the “Master.” Young girls, who would have blushed to show their ankles yesterday, are popping themselves in skins and sandals with the glee of children. There is an eloquent Free Church Minister staying here who preaches twice every quarter against the theatre, and is now about to appear as a Druid priest with a sickle. He rehearses his part like any actor at the Haymarket. Frivolity is immediately resented. When I suggested that a fleet of motor-boats should bring the Norseman to the shore, just to contrast the old ideas with the new, shocked looks met me, and an open protest. The most trivial mistake costs its maker a reproof. I have just heard Arthur deliver a sound rating to a wretched tailor who thought that a Dane might very well carry a musket, and produced one left to him by his great-grandfather. The majesty of the Pageant brooks no levity.

It will be apparent to you that I had little opportunity for any really private talk with my beloved cousin during these first days of my arrival, nor does there appear any possibility of my finding one until this mummery is over. For that matter, I am very doubtful of the utility of such a proceeding, nor do I think that I shall profit by it. A sportsman would consent to my plan immediately; but Arthur is not a sportsman. I shall propose to him that we divide the inheritance, and have done with it; but I know from the outset he will find some shifty plea upon which he may excuse himself. If he does, I am what the world calls a ruined man--which is to say, Paddy, that I must work for my bread like any other decent fellow, and not complain if the loaf is yesterday’s.

Sometimes I admit that the change will be stupendous. I have wanted for nothing, as you know, since I was a little child. My poor father indulged me in every way, so that now, at the mature age of twenty-four, I am as blasé as many a man of forty. All that any sane bachelor can need is to be purchased by seven thousand pounds a year. I can run a motor-car, keep a small sailing yacht, hire a shoot, travel. I need no house, for the finest hotels are open to me, with all their luxuries. From that to abject poverty is to be a swift descent. Paddy, I shall have a subsistence, but nothing more. The rest will go to dear cousin Arthur--to the glory of God and the purchase of a manor-house he has his eye upon.

Meanwhile, there is always Mimi. Would she come to me, I wonder, if I were poor? It might be so; in which case one of the Beatitudes would again be justified, and Harry Gastonard awakened in an instant from his lethargy. I shall ask her this question when I find her--to-night or to-morrow, as the case may be, Paddy.

Meanwhile, waft me your blessing across the emerald seas, and find me, as always, Your friend,

Harry Gastonard.