Our Street

Front matter

See sage 44. OUR STREET BY LESLIE KEITH _ Author of ' Of All Degrees,' 'Ralph Ellison's Opportunity,' etc. iLonooit THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY 56 Paternoster Row 65 St Paul's Churchyard AND 164 TlCCADILLY Under the general title os' Tales for the Twilight Hour,' the Religious Tract Society is issuing a Series of Stories intended for adult rather than for juvenile readers.^ They deal with those phases of life and experience which are most full of interest to young men and young women, and to thoughtful readers generally. The present volume begins the Series, and it is to be immediately followed by 2. The Shadow on the Hearth. Ey Rev. T. S. Millington, M.A., Author of 'Straight to the Mark,' ' No Choice.' 3. Half Brothers. By Hesba Stretton, Author of 'Jessica's First Prayer,' 'Cobwebs and Cables,' etc. CONTENTS. PAGE

Chapter I. Some Of Our Neighbours

IT was as our next-door neighbour in Quebec Street that we first knew Dinah Hope. Looking back now upon a long and honourable term of V friendship, it seems strange to tell ourselves that there was a time when Dinah was our neighbour and nothing more — our nameless, storyless neighbour, known to us only as ' The Lady of No. 39.' And yet a good neighbour, even if she be a stranger, is of great value in such a street as Quebec Street, where, as in other parts of this great mysterious London, it may easily chance to one to find oneself in unexpected and unwelcome company. Where is Quebec Street ? you ask, and perhaps you will remain unenlightened by the answer, for it is quite a humble, almost a third-rate street, and wealth and fashion do not dwell there. The names of its inhabitants are not recorded in the Red Book, and none of them are genteel enough to receive ' carriage company ' ; nobody in it has much money, and some, indeed, have so little that they try to make it more by one or other of the devices adopted by respectable poverty.

A few take in boarders, when these can be secured, others let rooms to lodgers. In our day a professor of music and a professor of languages economically and peaceably shared a brass announcement-plate between them. There was at least one widow who took in plain needlework, and another who practised the humbler branches of dress-making, while a third solitary woman devoted herself to the making of widows' caps. There was no clause in the agreements which we signed with our landlord restraining us from advertising our occupations boldly on door or window ; nor were we forbidden to hang out the family washing in the little back yard that separated each of us from the livery stables in the rear — two indulgences which will sufficiently illustrate our humble social standing as a street. And yet, in common with many of the poorer parts of London, we shared equally one privilege with the rich.

Thrust as we were into the very heart of South Kensington — the great and fashionable quarter having grown around our lowly street and hemmed us in — we were as near as they to the wide open spaces of Hyde Park. Though it was but on foot we could enter that big playground, perhaps we were not altogether the losers on that account. The carriage people must follow a prescribed route, and content themselves, for the most part, with the study of each other's gowns and bonnets, while we who were free to explore its midmost depths and unexpected soli tudes, might now and then (if we could but ignore the sooty sheep) cheat for a little that nostalgia that is inevitable in country-bred folk, by glimpses and dreams of the old home. Then Quebec Street was forgotten, the fashionable world that it shabbily elbowed was remembered no more.

The hum of traffic became the boom of the sea or the rush of the wild west wind over the moors, or the babble of the burn down its rocky bed, and the trees were the trees that we knew as giants climbing to the sky when we were little, and when a glory was still upon the world. We were fresh from the country, my husband and I, when we settled in Quebec Street, and the, unfrequented parts of Hyde Park were on many a dull day our refuge and our consolation. Why and how we came to make what our friends were pleased to call a great descent in the world by hiding ourselves in this obscure quarter matters very little here, since this story is scarcely our story so much as that of other people. Suffice it that we spent some years there, and that looking back from our present prosperity we count them not the least happy of a long married companionship.

It was there, at least, that we first knew Dinah Hope, and we write that friendship reverently among the mercies of our life. We were country folk, as I have said, and possibly that may account for or excuse the keen and lively interest we took in our neighbours. And yet why should it need excuse ? It has always seemed to me one of the saddest features of London that we who front its strenuous exacting life side by side, who are ' equally creatures of hope and desire,' subject to similar pleasures and fears, may yet live and die in entire and wilful ignorance of each other, in entire contentedness to make no division of our common satisfactions or distresses. The joys perhaps do not suffer, it is easy to be glad alone, but how about the disgraces, the wounds, the defeats that we pass by uncaring on the other side of the way ?

In our Scotch village there was not a cut finger or a broken head we did not know about, and make some shift to mend, and I own still to the same meddlesome desire — incurable in me now that I am an old woman — to have a hand in administering the oil and the wine to a fainting fellow traveller. They tell me that it is never safe nowadays to bestow the twopence unless you can verify the neighbour's story in every ..particular, and make quite sure that the thieves are not a clever invention of his brain, calculated to stir your pity ; but I recall no such warning in the parable; and certain it is that if Dinah Hope had delayed to assure herself of our integrity and re spectability before playing the Samaritan's part, we should not to-day cherish her among those we love the best. We felt the chill edge of this disregard keenly at first when we settled down in our dingy, shabby little house like children who are in disgrace and are studiously left to suffer the consequences.

Nobody called, friendlily inquisitive about our affairs, to cheer me with a word of praise for the little contrivances I had devised for the brightening of our rooms, or even to ask me how I liked Quebec Street. I think I could have managed honestly to praise it, at least faintly, for its negative virtues, if I could have extracted a little more human interest out of it ; but our fellow-tenants treated us with a seemingly entire indifference, unless it might be those who took in lodgers or boarders, and these we fancied were a trifle hostile and suspicious in their glances. Might not we be about to set up as rivals, increas ing the competition and adding to the hazards of a business that already involved too many risks ? It was difficult, I daresay, for our struggling neighbours to understand how two quite young people could afford to occupy, without any apparent means of support, a basement, a first floor, and two floors above, modest as these were.

My husband at that time wrote at home, and so did not even join the procession of fathers, sons and brothers which, morning by morning, streamed past our windows going to the day's toil. We put them down as ' something in the city,' clerks, most of them, no doubt, or shopkeepers in a humble way. There was a surgeon too, at the end of the street, but he seemed to have very little to do. Quebec Street was either too healthy or too poor to support a doctor of its own. We knew the outsides of all the houses long before we became known to any of their tenants. No. 1 was occupied by the surgeon, Mr. Appleyard, who had a red glass lamp over his door, and a night-bell which looked rusty for want of use. There was a row of flower-pots on the window sill of the dining room, but the plants in them were sere and brown, the curtains were dingy, the doorstep neglected.

The house, indeed, said as plainly as possible that poor Mr. Appleyard had lost heart, and took melancholy views of a world where nobody needed pills or powders. The dressmaker's window had a model of a bride in wax, with a long train and a veil, a simpering, silly creature, who seemed sadly out of place in our busy street, where the brides had so soon to turn into hard-working housewives with no time to cherish little vanities. The cap-maker who lived next door to the dressmaker took up the story and ended it for us ; a great many of our poor neighbours had passed from their bridal days to the sorrowful loneliness of struggling widowhood, and it was chiefly they who eked out their little means by letting rooms to lodgers. The house that attracted us most was the one next to ours, known to us as No. 39, it was always so neat, and it seemed to radiate forth a cheerfulness that was as good as sunshine.

The doorstep was spotless, the little curtains at the windows as fresh as possible, the flowerpots there were not neglected, but always filled with some modest green thing that grew as if it found itself at home. The occupant, who appeared to be a solitary person, we took at first to be a widow or a spinster, and yet she had not the look that belongs to either. Hers was a thoroughly contented face ; a spinster, when she is elderly and poor, so often has an incomplete look, if I may use the expression ; she seems to have missed something, to have been defrauded of her woman's share, and to be a little soured by the lack, perhaps ; but our neighbour had far too happy a face to belong either to the most resigned old maid, or to a wife whose married joys are buried in her husband's grave. She always reminded me, when I saw her bending over her work in the little window, of Dekker's ' Happy Heart,' and the refrain, ' Oh, sweet content, oh, sweet content,' rushed to my lips.

Walter, my husband, called her, after Elia's heroine, ' my sprightly neighbour,' and we were quite absurdly disappointed when we found out that her name was not Hester. We were both justified, for with her sweetness there was a liveliness and vivacity, a gaiety in her alert, straight figure, a smiling humour in her kind, brown eyes that were as good as a tonic only to see. Somehow one never stopped to ask if this wholesome, pleasant creature were old or young, and yet I suppose at this time she must have reached the trying plane of middle life, the hardest bit of the journey, lacking both the morning's brightness and freshness and the evening's serene peace. Yes, middle-aged as the years go, she undoubtedly was, but young with the beautiful youth of tender out-going sympathy for everything that God has made. ' If she is unwed,' we said, ' some man has blundered sadly;' but that question was very soon settled.

It was August when we came to our new home — August, the most airless month in the London year, and very far from fresh in our close little street, where the atmosphere was apt to be tainted by the too great nearness of the mews. But one could not live with shut windows, even if the odours that came in were unsavoury. Ours were all open one morning, and so were those of the next-door house, and I could clearly distinguish the words of my neighbour's song. It seemed characteristic that the first time I heard her voice it should be lifted in singing. It was a pleasant, refined voice, and she was chanting the 23rd Psalm in George Herbert's quaint version : — ' The God of love my shepherd is, And He th.-it doth me feed : While He is mine, and I am His, What can I want or need?' I knew the verse of that sometime courtier and saintly man — knew it, that is to say, intellectually — as part of an education that my father had taken care should be old-fashioned — rather, as yet, than as a lover of the holiness he strove to follow ; and it surprised me, perhaps unreasonably, to meet with it in Quebec Street, where a seventeenthcentury poet seemed incongruous.

When I spoke of it to Walter he only laughed. ' I could have told you that,' he said; 'she has it in her face — the quaint humour and the goodness. I daresay you would find she knows the whole school of Donne by heart.' 'Then I'm "afraid she must be an old maid after all,' I said illogically ; ' and I wonder for whom she was mending all those stockings ? ' The wonder was answered that afternoon when a cab was pulled up at No. 39, out of which there stepped two young girls, a boy, and a middle-aged man. The latter was the last to get out, I noticed, and he allowed the girls and their brother — for that was, without doubt, the relation in which they stood to each other — to remove and carry in all the various coats, rugs, sticks, and fishing-rods that were evidently his share of the luggage.

That was the reason, too, why he was the last to be taken into that liberal embrace in which the girls and boy had already been swallowed up. Our sprightly neighbour's face was lit with such beautiful love and kindness and delight that even I, stranger as I was, peeping from behind my muslin curtains, felt a pang of indignation when her husband — for, of course, he was the husband — turned a grudging, cold cheek towards her, and suffered rather than returned her caress. I heard him grumbling about the length of his journey, the price of the cab, the heat of the day, and demanding whether there was anything ready for him to eat, as they retired into the house. He got the whole growl into the minute it took him to cross the pavement, while the boy and the cabman struggled with the big bo.xes.

I could not help going to tell Walter. ' She has a husband,' I said, ' a dreadfully selfish, cross creature, and two girls, one of whom looks dull and discon tented, and the other proud, and a boy — well, the boy is a little like her ' 'A selfish husband, has she?' he said. 'Then that accounts for her cheerfulness.' I hoped Walter did not mean to test my forbearance in the same way. I am sure it would very soon have broken down if he had looked as gloomy and peevish as our neighbour's husband ; and yet she sang all the morning, and blu.sh.ed like a girl just because he was coming home from a sea trip she had not shared. 1 might have been more interested in the new aspect of affairs next door if I had not happened at this time to fall ill. Walter afterwards declared that I did it on purpose to give Mr. Appleyard a patient, but at the time he had no heart to jest.

I suppose it was the change from the fresh air of the North to the close and crowded street, from luxury to comparative stint, but I seemed to be fading away, and slipping contentedly enough out of life, in spite of my kind doctor's anxious care and skill. When I grew worse, instead of better, Walter, who like most husbands is quite useless in such an emergency, lost his head, and flew in a panic into No. 39. He told me afterwards he must have seemed quite mad. Our neighbour was baking a pie at the kitchen table when he rushed in on her and seized her by the floury hands. ' Nobody can help us but you,' he said inco herently ; ' Mr. Appleyard sent me — will you come ? ' She understood him in a moment, and almost before he could explain, she had washed her hands, tied on a clean apron, and was quietly ready to go with him.

When I opened my eyes that evening from a feverish dream, it seemed to me as if she had been there for a long time. The room was in beauti ful order, the medicine bottles in neat array, some food on a tray daintily prepared to tempt an un willing appetite, and a kind, good face bending over mine. ' You are Hester,' I greeted her. ' No, my dear,' she smiled, ' I am Dinah Hope.' ' You were singing George Herbert,' I said ; my memory held nothing more recent than that sacred song. She blushed and smiled again. ' I was so happy that day,' she said ; ' my husband and children were coming back to me.' B I could not remember anything about the husband and children, but it did not seem to matter since she was there. Even when she slipped away, I did not feel uneasy, because I knew she would come back again.

And come back she did, and watched through the night with me, so patient with my fretfulness, so loving and skilful that, for the first time, I began to think it might be best, after all, to live. Once, when I waked from a very short sleep, I saw her kneeling by a chair, her face hidden. She knelt a long time, forgetting me, I think, and I did not move. 'For whom were you praying?' 1 asked by-and by when she rose. And again she said — ' For my dear husband and children.' I remembered the man now, the man with the sallow, peevish face, and the discontented-looking girls, and the boy who was like his mother. And yet she called him — that sour creature whose name she bore — 'dear.' ' I have a husband too,' I said, 'and I suppose he wants me to get well. Why don't you pray for him ? ' Her only answer was to kneel again by my bedside, and holding my hand in her own, to pray for us both.

I don't think I ever heard quite such a prayer— it was so real, as if she saw God in the room, and so simple, as if she were speaking face to face with Him. It frightened me a little — it made Him so near, and I shrank from that nearness ; but I was glad that she asked that, if it were His will, I should recover, because I thought He must hear her, and I loved my life after all. Walter slipped in very softly, not even letting the door creak, and stood at the foot of the bed, and I saw that he was greatly moved. I think he was praying with her. Walter never had my difficulty about defining God — he believed in Him, but then he was always better than I. Whether it were in answer to Dinah Hope's prayer or not, I began from that day to recover, and was soon well again. And now that I have told you how we came to know our neighbour, I mean as well as 1 can to try to tell the story of our street, and her share in its chronicles.

If I must appear at times to have been ubiquitous, that is my tale-teller's privilege. Some of the incidents I heard afterwards from others, but most of what is related here is just what we saw for ourselves, day by day. And there is nothing so last ing in its teaching, so good for us to study, as the living example of lives lived for God.

Chapter II

A BAD TEMPER. FEOPLE who have very bad tempers ought to live in detached houses with large gardens all round them ; at least, they should not choose the slim, jerry-built ' residence ' of modern London, where the walls seem designed on purpose to convey our domestic noises next door. A bad temper is worse than a piano or a mangle, as No. 38 discovered when the master of 39 came home. Mr. Hope must have habitually risen on the wrong side, as we used to say in nursery days, the growl began so early, almost before he could have been out of bed, and it went on without intermission until he joined the procession of fathers and brothers and went upon his sulky way to the city. Had I been Mr. Hope's sponsor, I should have christened him Andrew or Richard, names which carry suggestions of unpleasantness to my mind, for certain reasons, but he was James, which sounded a great deal too mild and inoffensive for him.

But at least he always got his full tale of letters : one could not conceive of anybody wanting to call him Jim, or to be familiar with him, or affectionately to distort or abbreviate his name ; he was James, even to his wife, and to all the rest of Quebec Street he was scrupu lously Mr. Hope. Everybody is respectful to a bad temper ; one gets out of its way as one would get out of the way of a _o wild beast. The man was like an east wind, he made you shiver down your spine when you met him, his light eyebrows drawn into a scowl, his mouth firmly shut. His girls trembled before him, and even the sunny bright boy, who was so like his mother, looked depressed and constrained in his presence. It was a long time — I had to be older and wiser than I was then — before I could make any allowance for Mr. Hope, or concede that his infirmity might be half physical ; or remember that probably he suffered more than his victims from the bursts of rage which, alternating with his growls, could only make one think of demoniacal possession.

No doubt he was often sorry when it was too late, though pride prevented him from saying so, but his remorse, if indeed he felt it, did not teach him heedfulness. A moment's lull and the storm would burst out with greater fury ; he had never taken the first step towards self-mastery, and every act of yielding to his passion but furthered the enemy's conquest. Indeed, he had so steadily given place to the devil that one could not think of it as a battle any longer, but only as a surrender all along the line. There was but one person who hoped and prayed and believed in the grace of God that changes the human heart, and she was the chief suf ferer from his intemperate outbursts. Mr. Appleyard, who was kind enough to have had the health of all Kensington in his keeping, if merit were always rewarded, used to make good-natured excuses for him.

He talked of his neurotic temperament, his indifferent health, his disappointment in growing to middle life with no better prospect for his old age than that of a poor clerk. One could scarcely blame his masters that they did not care to take such an alternately sour and inflammable disposition into partnership. A neurotic temperament is all very well, but it scarce excuses one for breaking the crockery in a fit of passion. There was one small good purpose which Mr. Hope served — he was as useful as a beacon-light to the young mistress of a very young and heedless ser vant, who got off with fewer scoldings than might have fallen to her lot, but for that muttered thunder that penetrated our thin walls, and seemed continually to be saying, ' Take care you don't become a growler too.' During my convalescence, when I lay on the little sofa in the parlour, trying not to long for the sweet North-country air which we could not afford, the Hope girls came often to seeme.

Theo, the elder, who had a great deal of energy, but no turn for teaching, was a waitress in a tea-shop ; Dinah, the younger, called Di for distinction, helped her mother at home. Theo was a pretty girl, with her mother's dark eyes, but with a spark of fire in them which she inherited from the other side, and an almost too firm mouth and chin. Di, who was sallow and plain, took rather desponding views of life, and was subject to chronic fits of depression, which she often shared with me. 'It is all very well for you, Mrs. Garland,' she would say, ' with a husband who would lie down and let you walk over him, if you wanted to, but if you had father to live with ' This indeed opened up a limitless subject of specu lation — if it were one's unhappy fate to live with Mr. Hope ! My imagination refused to grasp the magni tude of that misfortune. ' You have your mother, Di, the best mother girl was ever blessed with.' ' Oh yes, mother's very good, but then she's a Christian ' This was said as if it somehow detracted from her merit in being the unselfish, loving creature she was. 'Aren't you, Di ? ' ' No,' said Di despondingly, ' I've never got religion ; I've never had a call, and I don't see that it would be any good if I had.' ' Perhaps it would help you to bear things at home if you believed as your mother does,' I said hesita tingly, feeling how wretchedly unfitted I was to give counsel, for that high hope did not always sustain my own soul in its lesser trials. ' No,' she said again ; ' father would take all the comfort out of it.

He spoils everything. It's better just to own straight out that you're bad, than to be always trying to be good and never getting a chance. It's no use people telling you that you've only got to believe, and that you'll find everything smooth and easy ; my believing wouldn't make father stop raging if the pair of boots he happened to fancy wasn't brushed, or if he had changed his mind in the night and wanted bacon for breakfast when he had ordered fish. Mother says I should forget my worries and not brood over them ; but there's never any time be tween breakfast and tea to forget. I jump and tremble at every knock, thinking it's father come back an hour sooner to scold about something he had over looked in the morning. He never comes home with out a grievance ; if he hasn't a new one he falls back on an old one, till we're worried to death ; if there's nothing wrong at home he picks one up in the way.' It was difficult to sympathise without seeming to encourage disrespect, for, after all, the man was the girl's father, and we ought surely to cherish a duteous reticence and veil the wounds we suffer in the house of our friends, even if, alas for us ! we can no longer hide from ourselves the faults of those who bore us. 'Father's a member of the Church,' she went on again in the same dull, aggrieved voice — 'he goe3 to communion — he goes with mother when perhaps he has been nagging at her and making her cry all night.

She comes down smiling, but I can see the trouble in her eyes — when you've cried as much as we've had to cry you can't hide it. I would rather be a heathen at once than a Christian like that ! Whatever I am, I am not a hypocrite.' I did not want to let her go comfortless, and yet how difficult it was to say the right word ! Men like Mr. Hope have much to answer for ; it was to another such as he, whose professed faith and consistent prac tice were widely sundered, that I owed the spiritual difficulties that for so long kept me from struggling to the light. How can one believe in the divine efficacy of love and grace to change the heart, when so many who call themselves the Master's disciples are content to let their lives illustrate nothing but the triumph of sin in them ? ' It is not for us to judge each other,' I said at last, preaching to myself quite as much as to her. ' One's fitness or unfitness to partake of the Lord's Supper is a question between one's own soul and God.

Perhaps your father gets the help we all may get there—per haps ' I said this very feebly, for it really would be difficult to find a more thoroughly distempered creature than Mr. Hope — ' perhaps he would be even less considerate at home without this aid.' Di looked at me with a kind of dull scorn. ' It is all very well for you to talk,' she ended as she had begun ; 'but just you exchange places with me for a week, and see how you would like it ! ' I was thankful that my duties as a wife prevented my acceptance of this challenge. I am sure I should have come out of the ordeal with very little distinction, and probably have developed a temper quite as tindery as our neighbour's. As if to show me what I had escaped, Mr. Hope seemed to have redoubled his usual fury when he came home that night.