The Man Who Understood Women and Other Stories/The Lady of Lyons'
THE LADY OF LYONS'
The jovial solicitor who smacked his clients on the back had absconded, and the minor poet had no longer fifty pounds per annum. Although he was a minor poet, which—strangely enough—is a term of contempt in this country, though we are enjoined to be grateful for even small mercies, he was as human as minor novelists and minor critics, and he suffered. Also he woke; he realised how small had been the world's demand for the wares in which he dealt—he acknowledged that for twenty years he had been living on his little income, not on his little books.
His name was Smith. It was, perhaps, one of the reasons why his poetry was unread. Only a reviewer possessed of unusual courage could have discovered "the great poetry of Mr. Smith." Only a poet devoid of commercial instincts could have failed to adopt a nom de guerre.
In the face of disaster Mr. Smith did not make precisely this reflection, but he reflected painfully that a lack of commercial ability was no longer a matter to be recognised with a smile. He stood among the daffodils in the village garden, and asked Heaven what would become of him. He was seven-and-thirty; the only craft that he had learnt was useless; and he had to earn his bread-and-cheese.
As Heaven returned no answer, he sought the advice of friends. He was a lovable creature, though a writing man, and his friends were sympathetic. They all invited him to dinner, and assured him warmly that they would bear his necessities in mind. If anything turned up, he might rely upon their telegraphing to him. Being of a trustful disposition, Mr. Smith returned to the daffodils, encouraged.
And they withered while he waited for a telegram.
When they hung their heads, he sought advice again. This time his friends did not invite him to dinner, but they pointed out to him, lest he should overlook it, that he was a poet—in other words, that he was a difficult person to serve. "You have no experience, you see," they said frankly. "You are intelligent, but you have no experience, Robert." When a man is untravelled in the groove that we ourselves tread, we say that he has "no experience."
One afternoon the poet went abroad. The journey cost him a penny, and he travelled from Charing Cross as far as the Bank. He was bound for an office in Lombard Street, and as he called by appointment, a clerk showed him promptly to Mr. Hutton's private room.
The business man who received him had once been a little boy in a sailor suit, and he and Robert had played together in a nursery. To-day he had numerous financial irons in the fire, and one of them required an obedient gentleman to watch it. Affection suggested Robert for the post. The duties were simple, and the salary was slight, but if the iron came out in good condition, there was to be a slice of the iron, too.
They chatted for a long while. Robert was admitted to some confidences about the other irons—the patents, and the shares, and the concessions. All the time that he listened he was seeing the business man as a little boy in a sailor suit again, and was awestruck to hear the little boy talking so glibly of such mysteries. Blankly he felt that he himself had omitted to grow up; he decided that people were right in declaring that he had no experience; it appeared to him suddenly that he had learnt nothing in his life. But, of course, he had learnt many things, though never the most important one—how to make money.
Often they were interrupted by the telephone bell, and during one of the colloquies on the telephone Mr. Hutton seemed depressed. Robert feared he was being browbeaten until he hung up the receiver, and announced, smiling, that he had "made five hundred pounds by that conversation." It was miraculous. Robert had not made five hundred pounds by twenty years of work.
"Let's go out and get a cup of coffee," said Mr. Hutton, and piloted the poet through a maze of alleys to a retiring doorway. "What will you have to drink?" The poet discovered that after two o'clock "a cup of coffee" in the City is generally a synonym for a whisky-and-soda.
The little bar was crowded, and he was surprised at seeing such a number of business men doing nothing so leisurely. One man to whom he was introduced asked him if he knew how the "House" closed, but he did not even know what it meant. They discoursed in groups, and a strange language; Robert was flooded by compassion for the barmaid. All expounded different views, and all the views were equally unintelligible to him. The only point of unanimity he perceived was the wisdom of having "a fiver each way." As often as anybody entered, the several groups waved hands, and the newcomer accepted a whisky-and-soda with a piece of lemon in it, among the group he fancied best. On leaving, Mr. Hutton remarked that he had "sometimes made as much as a thousand pounds by dropping in there." Robert reeled.
Soon he went every day to the strange land where man talked a language that he did not know. It had been decided that he should watch the iron in the neighbourhood, so that Mr. Hutton might extend a guiding hand without discomfort, and an office was rented in Eastcheap. Eastcheap is a sour-smelling thoroughfare into which dirty loafers emerge from the courts of Billingsgate in order that they may have more room to spit. Distressing as Robert found it to sit in the office, he found it more distressing to go out.
Of course not many people see the City. Myriads saw it once, but that was when they came there in their youth. Few are to be discovered in the City who remember how it looks. Occasionally a clerk in his first berth may be found who sees the City, but he is not promised to the casual searcher, for City clerks as a body are observant in the streets of one thing only. They observe neckties. This passion, to which the hosiers of the district pander inordinately, was displayed to the poet between the hours of one and two, wet or fine. From desk to food, from food to desk, streamed the black multiude, expressionless, torpid and unseeing, until neckties flaunted in a window; then the vacant faces brightened, and there was a block. The rule of the pavement is known everywhere excepting in the City, where it is most needed; but at the hosiers' windows pedestrianism became more than an effort—it became a feat.
Robert's eyes had no custom in them; Robert did see the City, and he was unhappier than he had poetry to tell; for that matter, he did not' try to tell it. He wrote nothing now but figures, and commercially ungrammatical epistles which took him a long time to compose. For twenty years he had believed his rushlight was a star—he had done with illusion at last. Illusion was in its grave, and the Failure laid his hope of laurels on the top. Yet he thought tenderly of Illusion. The funeral was over, but he mourned. He had embraced a new career, but he did not love it. Although he repeated that the past was dead, he could not prevent its ghost haunting Eastcheap. There were moments when it chilled the iron.
Often, as he forced his dreary way to luncheon, it walked beside him. He lunched sometimes with his preserver in the restaurants of the Employers. Generally he lunched with the ghost in the restaurants of the Employed. He noted that in the former the meat was tainted less frequently. On the other hand, the Employed were served by clean, quiet girls instead of by sleezy, vociferous waiters.
One afternoon he lunched at an establishment that he had not tried before. The ghost had been insistent all the morning. He found a vacant seat, hung up his hat, and examined the bill of fare. He was in one of the more modest restaurants of Messrs. Lyons, and around him young men and women with blank faces chumped beefsteak pudding, and read sixpenny editions of the novels that are written for them. The girl beside him ordered apple-tart. Her voice was pleasant, and momentarily he regretted that in reading she leant her cheek upon her palm, for she hid her profile. It should have been a pretty profile, to match her voice. Moved by an impulse of curiosity, he glanced at the page she pondered, and then he dropped the menu: she was reading his own verse!
"Good God!" he exclaimed.
"I beg your pardon?" said the girl, surveying him with dignity.
"I apologise," stammered the poet; "I was startled."
Evidently she found his excuse inadequate, and he was thankful that at this moment they were left with the table to themselves. "I meant that I was startled to see the book you were reading," he explained.
"I see nothing startling in it," said the lady, still frigid.
He felt that she might have expressed herself more happily, but hew as in no position to rebuke her. "Of course in one sense it isn't startling at all," he concurred; "in fact, it's very feeble."
"I am afraid I can't agree with you," rejoined his reader; and the haughtiness of her contradiction warmed his heart.
"You can't mean you really like it?"
"I like it very much." She had grey eyes that challenged him scornfully; he sunned himself in her disdain.
"Did you buy it?" he asked, a tremor in his tone.
"Really—!" she began. But his air was so respectful that she added the next instant, "Yes, for twopence, second-hand."
"Ah!" said the poet. "Still, it's a most extraordinary occurrence."
She looked away from him with a frown; her attention was divided between his verse and the apple-tart. Robert sat a prey to tempation. To melt her by avowing himself would be ridiculous, but agreeable. Succumbing, he murmured:
"To tell you the truth, I am glad you like the book."
"Eh?" she said. "Why?"
"Because I wrote it."
It should have been a dramatic moment, but the girl bungled her part and disbelieved him.
Fully five minutes were devoted to convincing her. However, the five minutes brought such a flutter of pink to her cheeks, so tender a glow into her eyes, that the time was by no means wasted.
"I couldn't expect to meet a poet in the City," she pleaded.
"And certainly I couldn't expect to meet any Gentle Reader here," said Robert. He examined the slim volume ruefully.
"In such good condition, and only twopence!" he complained.
"If it had been more I mightn't have bought it," she said.
He found himself resigned to the book's having been marked down to twopence.
She told him that she wrote shorthand in an office in Cornhill. Eastcheap lay in the same direction, and after she had gone he felt that it would have been pleasurable to walk some of the way beside her.
He was sorry, too, that he had omitted to inquire if she irradiated the restaurant daily.
On the morrow he betook himself to Lyons' with hope. He descried the lady at a distant table, and it had the charm of vacant chairs. There was no reason why he should ignore them.
"You are often in the City, then?" she asked as he sat down.
"I come every day," said Robert; and seeing she was mystified, he added, "I am in an office here, like you."
But plainly this mystified her more still. "Do you mean you are in business?"
"Truly," he told her. "I think I shall have roast-beef."
"I should try the mutton," she said. "But you are a poet?"
"I used to fancy myself one."
It was very absurd, but before they paid their bills he was informing her that he had divorced his Muse, and was in a foreign land alone. This time they left the restaurant together.
"That, O foreigner," said the lady of Lyons', "is the Royal Exchange!"
"I know," said Robert. "But what do they exchange in it?"
"I have no idea," she confessed. "If you like, we will ask a policeman."
"A curious thing about policemen," remarked the poet, "is that if you want a polite answer, you should avoid putting your question politely. They are, conspicuously, a class who respect rudeness. How long have you been coming to the City, to learn so much about it?"
"I have been coming to the City for nine years," she said, "and I have learnt a great deal. I know now where the Tower is, and which of the benches under the trees makes you feel most Harrison Ainsworthy. And I know the shop in Cornhill that sells the best twopenny tarts. They are small, but peerless."
"If you hadn't bought my verses you might have had another," sighed Robert. "Some day, when I have made my fortune, I shall give you one."
"Thank you," she said. "I suppose you know what you are looking at across the road?"
"I am looking at a bookshop," replied the poet.
"You were meant to see the Mansion House," demurred his guide, "where the Lord Mayor lives."
"I do not like Lord Mayors," said Robert; "they never ask me to their literary dinners."
"They are punished for it," said the girl. "Once a year at midnight they drop their little glass slippers, and their beautiful coach turns back into a pumpkin."
"It serves them right," said the poet vengefully.
But they were not always so foolish as this. To meet at luncheon became their custom, and sometimes their confidences were quite practical. By dint of lunching hurriedly on occasion, they made time to reach the Tower together, and he approved her taste in benches. It was on the bench one day when the sun shone that she told him her history. Her history was so commonplace that she apologised for relating it, and her surprise was vast that he fell to reverie.
"Why," he cried, "we have found a Moral! It is you who are to be pitied, not I. What have I to mourn in the City? I have buried nothing here but the gift of making little verses. But you you have buried the divinest gift of the gods, your beautiful youth! You have never had any pleasure in your life, yet you are content. I am ashamed."
Not long afterwards his preserver exclaimed:
"Bobbie, I think you're getting acclimatised. You're putting your back into it—if you don't take care you'll make money!"
"I aim at making money," said the poet with commercial staidness; and added, irresponsibly "I want to buy twopenny tarts."
It was just like him, to bid farewell to verse-making, and then to find his best poetry in the City. There are dreamers who would turn every opportunity to disadvantage.
But the iron is shaping so well that when it becomes a limited liability company with another manager, Robert's slice should be substantial.
We may imagine him going back to the daffodils.
It is not impossible that there will be orange blossoms.
And in the meantime there is certainly the luncheon hour.