THE GARDEN AT 19
CHAPTER I
I CAME TO LIVE AT NO. 20
IT HAD long been plain to me that I should live my life in London, that I could not hope to save enough money to buy, or start, a practice in a country town till I was too old to begin life afresh with any hope of success. Since therefore I was destined to life in London, I had always desired to live in Hertford Park, for it is the prettiest and greenest of the inner suburbs, and for me an outer sub urb is too far from the office. But it seemed impossible that I should compass even that desire for years; I was saving money far too slowly to hope to rent, much less to buy, a house in Hertford Park for a very long while. Then came my flutter in Tegean Corporations.
I have never understood how I came to take that flutter. I was no gambler. Very seldom I played bridge for tenpence a hundred at my boarding-bouse, Paragon House, in the Goldhawk Road; always I had half-a-crown on a Derby loser. My father, a country doctor with a large practice, had always had a fiver on a Derby loser; it seemed only dutiful to maintain the family tradition. But to buy a thousand Tegean Corporation shares on a margin was a very different matter.
Yet walking through Richmond Park one moonlit night I made up my mind that I would buy them. Perhaps it was that the moon was full. It is no confession for a young lawyer to make; but sometimes at the full moon I am a little mad. Several of my acquaintances have admitted to me that they are. It is an odd fact; but that it is a fact I am sure. Yet I ought to have awakened next morning in a more sober and less speculative spirit, my head clear of moonshine. I awoke with the resolve to buy them stronger than ever. It was something in the nature of a revolt against the tedium of my life so cramped by want of money. After all it was not a bad gamble. The syndicate proposed to acquire a large tract of land near Tegea, a village in Greece, for the purpose of growing on a large scale the little grapes which are dried into currants; and all the chief cur rant-merchants of Athens and London were interested in the venture and shareholders.
As soon as I reached the city, I went to the offices of the stock brokers who had acted for my father when he had run through all his money and property in a persevering effort to fill the pockets of Alfred Beit and Whitaker Wright. He died ten years earlier than he would have done, had those benefactors of the British Empire never emerged from the ghettos in which they were born. I had with me my Birkbeck bank-book which showed that I had £211 on deposit; and in five minutes I had arranged that my broker should buy me a thousand Tegean Corporations at nineteen shillings. There was the less difficulty about it since he knew me from the days when I had straightened out my paralyzed father's affairs and saved enough from the wreck to keep him in decent comfort for the two years he survived his losses.
Having completed this transaction, I went to my cousin's offices where I work. I got none of the gambler's excitement out of my flutter. It was a little odd, but I found myself almost indifferent whether Tegean Corporations went up or down. I dreamt none of Alnaschar's dreams. I went steadily through my work. When I went out to my lunch I did not trouble to buy an evening paper to learn whether Tegean Corporations were going up or down; I met a fellow member of the New Bohemians, and we talked about the latest book of G. K. Chesterton.
I did not even bother to buy a paper as I went home. But I found a late edition of the Pall Mall in the drawing-room of Paragon House, and read that Tegean Corporations had fallen to eighteen shillings. Fifty pounds out of my £211 had gone.
I was not depressed, though I sighed when I saw their price. After dinner I set out for Richmond Park and spent a delightful evening in it. At some moment during it I filled with the sense that Tegean Corporations were on the knees of the gods, and I was very well content to leave them there. If the gods wanted my two hundred and eleven pounds, they would certainly take them, and that was all there was to it. Still I could have wished that I was enjoying more of the sense of adventure in my flutter.
The shares remained at eighteen shillings for two days—the gods seemed to have lost all interest in my two hundred and eleven pounds. Then when I came out to lunch on the third day, the words Tegean Corporations, large on a poster, caught my eye, and I bought the paper.
It was one of those share-pushing penny rags which minister to the simple intellectual needs of the hardy clerk and at the same time strive to allure him to unburden himself in bucket-shops of any savings he may chance to have. But it was obliging me deeply by setting forth that Tegean Corporations were the noblest speculative venture presented to the British public since the palmy days of the Band. That night Tegean Corporations stood at twenty-one. My two hundred and eleven pounds were swelling. The next morning there were articles on the company in the financial dailies; they dealt with it in terms of lofty eulogy. Plainly the directors had made some useful press friends in the usual handsome fashion.
I thought it well to go round to my stock broker at eleven o'clock. I found that Tegean Corporations were occupying a good deal of the attention of the Stock Exchange. They had already reached twenty-six, and were still rising. All the flutterers in London were taking a flutter.
I gave instructions to my stock broker to sell my thousand if they sank to twenty-four, and went back to my work, proudly conscious that my two hundred and eleven pounds were at any rate four hundred and fifty. At half-past three my broker telephoned me that the shares were at thirty-four shillings and advised me to sell. I guessed that he had large selling orders at thirty-five, and bade him sell them. The next morning I received a check for £770, and started a deposit account at the Chiswick branch of the London and South Western bank.
That night I went up to my bedroom at Paragon House early, and sat down to consider at length what to do with my nine hundred and eighty-one pounds. The possession of that round sum had filled me with the feeling that I was master of my destiny.
I debated with myself whether I should in vest it in securities and devote the income from it to the enlarging of my life, or invest that income and watch my capital grow. Then the screeching of laughter rising to my ears from the drawing-room, where Mr. Lewis L. Melville, the chartered humorist of the boarding-house, was amusing my fellow boarders, settled the question. With the bulk of that round sum I would gratify my desire to have a house of my own, where I could live and read in peace and quiet. After three years in lodgings and six in boarding-houses the prospect charmed me.
I think that that desire was also very much an inheritance. The Plowdens, my father, grandfather, grand-uncles and uncles had all lived in houses of their own. I was following the family tradition.
I made no haste to buy that house. I have acquired a good deal of caution—a quality with which I was not born—during my years of practice of the law, and I searched for that house with great care. I knew where to look for it; I meant to live in Hertford Park, and I examined thoroughly all the houses for sale, all of them; that is, likely to be within the price I could pay, in Hertford Park. Indeed I rather worried the house agents in that district by the thoroughness of my researches.
At last after weighing the conflicting attractions of several houses, I decided to buy No. 20 Walden Road—at my own price, £450. It was a low price for a really well built, semi-detached ten-room house in Hertford Park. But it had been empty for six years. I had three long discussions with the imploring and almost tearful agent about that price before he accepted my offer. But in the end he accepted it, with what I thought a childish petulance, and handed the title-deeds over to me for examination.
I satisfied myself that they were in order and I should have a sound title; then thinking it a good thing to have a second opinion, I asked my cousin, Howard Stryke, the chief partner in the firm of Stryke and Hodgson, with whom I work, to look through them for me.
Howard received the information that I was buying a house of these parts and magnitude—I did not tell him the price—with considerable surprise, and said that he would be very pleased to look through the deeds, in a tone with quite a new inflection of respect in it. He gave me back the deeds the same afternoon, saying that the title was quite sound. Two days later, when I came in from lunch, a clerk told me that Mr. Stryke wished to speak to me. In his room I found Hodgson also. The firm was wearing an air of having lunched well, and in a joint conversation they informed me that they were pleased with my work—it was the first intimation I had had of it—and had decided to raise my salary from a hundred and fifty to two hundred a year. I thanked them with all the proper expressions of gratitude; and while I was very well aware that, little as I love the law, my work was good, I was not blind to the fact that my being an owner of house property had made it much easier for them to perceive its excellence. This rise of salary justified me of my expenditure on the house; the fifty pounds extra equalled five per cent, interest on my £981, and I had the house as well. In this world one cannot have everything. But I had certainly performed the feat of eating my cake and having it, too.
In the course of the next month I settled in No. 20, repaired, painted and papered at the expense of its late proprietor. When I handed over the £450 to the agent, he said: "Well, Mr. Plowden, you've certainly got a bargain. You wouldn't have got the house as cheaply as this, if there hadn't been something unlucky about Walden road, or at any rate about the lower half of it."
"It is rather full of empty houses," I said.
"Yes; nine out of the twenty are empty, ten to eighteen."
"Let's hope that my having taken No. 20 will break the spell," I said piously.
But as a matter of fact, I had no desire in the world to see the road fuller of inhabitants. I should hardly have taken a house at the bottom of a little cul-de-sac if I had hungered for neighbors. The fact is, I had become a good deal of a bookworm. When my father succumbed to the companies of Messrs. Beit and Whitaker Wright, I had just won a scholarship at Magdalen, and was looking forward with most glorious expectations to four years at Oxford. After the crash, when I had settled down to the business of the law as an articled clerk to the firm of Stryke and Wigran, partly out of obstinacy and partly because I found no pleasure in the society to which my lack of money condemned me and there was nothing else to do, I set myself to get exactly the education I should have had at Oxford. I read all the books, classics, history and philosophy, I should have read for Honor Mods. and Greats. I spent my evenings and most of the holidays of the five years between twenty and twenty-five on this work. It had been no slight strain to buy the books till I learned of the London library and became a subscriber. The result was that I bad so cultivated my taste for reading that for the last three years I had read as much as during the earlier five.
I did not talk about this taste at the office; if anyone there had known of it, I should have been reckoned utterly useless at the law, no matter what the actual quality of my work might be. It would indeed have been as safe to let it be known there that I was a member of the Society of New Bohemians.
It was then a great pleasure to come back from the office to my new home and get to my books unjarred by the conversation, at dinner, of my fellow boarders at Paragon House. Walden road must have been the quietest place in London. Perhaps it was owing to the fact that it curved, but though it was a turning off one of the main roads of Hertford Park, no sound of traffic reached No. 20 at the bottom of it. All the houses were on the left side of it. Along the right side of it ran the high brick wall of the garden of some city magnate. I did not mind the outlook on this blank wall, because the tall trees of the garden hung over it, and their green was, to my thinking at any rate, pleasanter than a row of houses would have been. The road then enjoyed the stillness of the country.
I began by furnishing three rooms only, three rooms and the kitchen. I furnished them barely, and gave myself the pleasure of picking up a piece of furniture at a time, when such a piece caught my fancy.
In this way I presently became the possessor of the most comfortable easy chair in London; and my bed, though it is large for my bedroom, must have been built and adorned for some eighteenth century princess. I bought both of them in sale-rooms, where I also bought several other pieces of furniture, one at a time, which I believed to be beautiful or knew to be comfortable. The bed I had fitted with the luxurious spring-mattress it deserved, for in the matter of furniture I do not believe in beauty divorced from comfort.
The matter of servants gave me no trouble. I took into my service a respectable old woman, Mrs. Ringrose, whose husband, a carpenter, had been disabled in a railway accident, and then swindled by the railway company out of his proper compensation. He had come to Stryke and Hodgson when it was too late—after he had signed away his claim for proper compensation to a wheedling rogue, the company's agent, for thirty pounds. When, soon afterwards, he died, his widow had been in a very poor way; and I had helped her get work, not much, cleaning offices. It had only sufficed to keep her alive; and when I offered her the post of cook and housekeeper to me, a home and wages, she accepted the offer with tears of joy. She was very deaf and not very skilful; but she kept the house spotlessly clean, and my simple tastes did not greatly tax her cooking powers. She looked after me with genuine devotion, served my purpose very well, and gave me no trouble.
I settled down in No. 20 early in the summer, and presently I joined the Hertford Park Lawn Tennis Club. I did not wish to become a sluggish recluse without muscles; and moreover, as a boy I had been a promising player. I was bad indeed at first, but at the end of a fortnight I began to play a moderate game. I am rather pertinacious when I give my mind to anything; and I fear that I neglected my books for lawn tennis whenever the weather was fine. But it was not fine long together, and I hardened my muscles and straightened out the stoop I was acquiring. At the Tennis Club I made the acquaintance of some of the inhabitants of the Park, their wives and their daughters, very pleasant people.
One evening I sat waiting with one of the oldest inhabitants of the Park, a Mr. Herbert Vincent, till a court should be vacant and we could play singles. We were talking as we waited, and presently he said: "You live in the Walden road, don't you?"
"Yes, at No. 20," said I.
"Do you find anything queer about the road?"
"Queer? No. How do you mean?" I said in some surprise.
"Well, I can remember the time when every house in it was always occupied. But for the last five or six years it has been impossible to get people to stay in it. One family at any rate cleared out when they had only been in it two months and went on paying rent for their house for three years; they lived at No. 18. Another family cleared out of No. 16 because they could not get a servant to stay with them. They say, both families, that there's something queer about it, but they don't seem to really know what."
"I've noticed nothing queer about it," I said. "Of course it's oddly quiet. The bend in it seems to have cut off the lower half from the sound of the traffic along the Southwell road. Sometimes I have the feeling of being far away from London, buried in the heart of the country. I have it even stronger sometimes than when I have actually been in the country. Now and then you hear the faint bleat of an electric train; and it destroys the impression. I like the stillness. But queer—no, I've never noticed anything queer."
"There are queer things, you know," said Vincent; and he rose, for the court was vacant.
I played tennis till the light went, and then I set out home. As I came down Walden road I thought of what Vincent had said about its being queer. Truly, it was very still; and the fancy came to me that there rested on it the brooding hush which sometimes comes before a storm.