Spilled wine

CHAPTER I T HE house in which I was born has since been pulled

down to make room for a cinema. It used to crouch, narrow and spiritless, above a small draper’s shop in the Portobello Road. It had a cowed look, like some¬ thing trapped into eternal and hideous subjection. Its dull eyes stared down out of a grimy face like a group of dominoes in a blank wall. It was the sort of house no one would ever be born in from choice.

These things I remembered when I went in search of it a few weeks ago—and found instead the garish fagade of a picture palace. As I picked my way along the dirty, crowded pavement a great wonderment came over me. “Here,” I told myself incredulously, “I lived for seven years of my life! I saw these sights! I heard these sounds! I breathed this atmosphere! I lived precisely as these children around me are living now!”

Very earnestly I strove to revive a definite sensation of recollection—to span the bridge of memories between my present self and that long ago, embryonic “Me,” and in doing so I grasped for the first time something of the fullness of the years that lay between; I realized how vagrant, how adventurous the journey had been.

If heredity be the all-important factor some people would claim, I cannot even begin to explain myself. I am as unlike the parents who produced me as a jungle tiger is unlike a back-yard cat. This is neither exaggeration nor conceit. It is the truth.

My father was a typical Cockney, soaked to the bone in all the little prides and prejudices of his class, slim, dap¬ per, restless, painstaking, an odd mixture of generosity and thrift, kindliness and bigotry. I can see him now, his well-brushed hair shining like varnish over his sleek head, his sandy moustaches carefully waxed at the ends, his twinkling, hazel eyes roving proudly over the contents of his little shop as he stood expectantly behind the counter.

My mother, on the other hand, was an entirely negative personality, gentle, quiet-voiced, flaccid, with an air of superficial refinement that stood out against the back¬ ground of her environment like a bunch of flowers stuck into the cheap vase that habitually stood upon a crude, woollen mat in the little sitting-room behind the shop. She came originally from the country and her soft brown eyes, under their crown of wavy, nut-brown hair, never entirely lost the wistful look of a trapped missel-thrush. I have sometimes wondered whether the smallness and the neatness of her hands and feet had an explanation in the past amour of some impressionable squire’s son and whether, after all, I am quite as plebeian in origin as I might otherwise suppose.

At the time of my birth they already had one other child, a boy of two named Stephen—generally shortened to “Steve.” Of this brother I have never had the least reason to be proud. In fact, as he grew up he developed into the worst kind of cad I have ever had the misfortune to be acquainted with. In many ways he was very like my father, but with all my father’s failings magnified into positive vices. For instance, the quite harmless conceits of the one became in the other an insufferable arrogance, thrift a despicable meanness, commercial sagacity a pe¬ culiarly low grade of cunning and avarice. It is difficult to recall a single good quality that he possessed, yet un¬ questionably he was my parents’ favourite. They loved him with an intense, unreasoning love that had the effect of blinding them to all his faults. It was as though, in the enthusiasm of his begetting, in gratitude for the one romantic, brightly-coloured patch of their otherwise drab existence, they had unquestioningly accepted the fact of his perfection.

For myself, I always had a feeling of being “in the way.” I am quite sure that neither of them ever really cared for me. They were never unkind; they were merely indifferent. They accepted me as an inconven¬ ient but accomplished fact and let it go at that.

Looking back over those first early years I gather an impression of perpetual conflicts and irritations arising out of the inevitable clash of my own and Stephen’s utterly opposed natures. The fact that I never could “get on” with my brother probably contributed largely to my own unpopularity in the family circle. In other ways, also, I may have been to blame. I think it prob¬ able that I was not an attractive child, neither affectionate, nor “clinging,” nor even pretty, while at a very early age I developed an armour of reserve and independence which certainly did not jtend to improve matters.

My general recollection of that pallid, far-away dawn of existence is so astonishingly meagre that at times I have a difficulty in believing in it at all. It was as though my mind, like a sensitive plant, deliberately closed itself against an uncongenial atmosphere. Impressions that succeeded in lodging themselves indelibly in my brain are no more than disconnected patches, broken fragments in the mosaic of memory. They join on to nothing; they lead nowhere; they float, living, vivid scraps, in a sea of blankness. But they serve to give some idea of the con¬ ditions under which I lived.

For instance, there is one of the shop, a dark, stuffy, over-stocked little interior with all the littered oddments of a low-class drapery trade flanking the walls, crowding the battered mahogany counter, hanging mysteriously from the ceiling, and in the midst of it all my mother, very docile and patient, supplying the needs of customers. I remember how her white face used to stand out against the dark rolls of material on the shelves behind her and how I used to love to watch the play of her hands as she measured off yards of ribbon or cloth. Even in those days I think I must have appreciated the fact that her hands were different from other people’s hands.

The picture fades and another takes its place. I see myself seated with the rest of the family at a round table that almost entirely fills the small room at the back of the shop. In addition to my mother and father and Stephen, there is an old toothless grandmother of whom I am extravagantly afraid, and who makes strange mumbling noises as she eats. ... I see my father pick his teeth elaborately and drink his tea out of the saucer. ... I see Stephen slyly pricking holes in the cloth with a greasy fork. . . .

Again, I see myself laboriously climbing the dark staircase that led upwards from a tiny passage outside the sitting-room door to some chilly, dim-lit room above. I feel the railings of the balusters shake under my childish hands like teeth in the jaws of a skull. . . .

I see myself kneeling before one of those dull windows, peering curiously out upon the street below. It is Satur¬ day night and a noisy, jostling crowd is surging to and fro upon the pavements. Rows of cheap-jack stalls line the gutters. I blink as the yellow naphtha lights flare up¬ wards to the violet sky. . . .

For the rest the slate of memory has been wiped clean, or at least so hopelessly blurred as to be indecipherable.

From the fact that, in my seventh year, we moved to another shop in the Walworth Road, Camberwell, a far more pretentious shop than the one we had left, I gather that my father’s affairs were beginning to make substan¬ tial headway.

If hard work and tireless personal devotion—combined with a certain, almost uncanny, aptitude for driving a bargain—could alone have ensured success, John Fielding would, I am convinced, have died a rich man. With a little more imagination, a little wider vision, a deeper sense of personal confidence he might, conceivably, have blossomed out into one of your modern commercial Napo¬ leons—a Self ridge, a Woolworth, a Jesse Boot. Even as it was, considering the smallness of his beginning, he must have done very well.

The house behind the Camberwell shop was far larger and infinitely more pleasant than the one in Portobello Road. Its rooms were more spacious, its stairs wider and it had nice, big, airy windows. It even boasted a strip of garden with a tumble-down rockery, a vine growing in a tub and a laburnum that broke faithfully into blossom every May.

The neighbourhood was also an improvement. At times, especially on a Saturday night, it exhibited the same tendency to rowdiness as Portobello Road, but it was certainly more prosperous. One had a feeling of being less cramped.

Altogether life assumed a more rosy outlook. A ser¬ vant came to help my mother with the housework, whilst two, and presently three, assistants filled her place in the shop. My father donned the conventional livery of middle-class respectability, a frock coat, and walked about rubbing his hands briskly together, addressing per¬ petual fussy remarks to every one he encountered, and looking each day more and more blatantly conscious of the success he was achieving. If anything his moustaches grew stiffer, his head more shiny—now with the best po¬ made—his ties more excruciatingly “natty.” He never grew fat, he never lost his almost bird-like appearance of Cockney dandyism, yet something about the very lines of his figure began presently to proclaim the subtle bloom of opulence.

For several years things went remarkably well with the business—so well, in fact, that between my tenth and twelfth birthdays my father was able to buy up first one and then another of the two shops that flanked his own, and eventually, at considerable cost, to have all three con¬ solidated into one large up-to-date “drapery store.”

Such an extension of premises naturally necessitated a much larger staff, and thus it happened that Martin Arm¬ strong, in the person of one of my father’s employees, first came into my life.

He was a tall, pale young man of about twenty, with eyes of a peculiarly lucid grey; thick, lightish brown hair swept carelessly back from an exceptionally high fore¬ head ; a tender, almost womanish mouth and a general air of dreamy preoccupation which, even to the inquiring eyes of a child, hardly fitted him for the role of drapery sales¬ man.

We became great friends from the first. He inspired me with an admiration more intense than anything of a like nature I had yet experienced. His coming brightened and quickened my whole existence in a way that I find difficult to describe. It was as though he came to me out of a new world, bringing a new message, speaking a new language. He was the first person of any real education or refinement I had ever known.

Most of us, in the course of development, pass through the hands of various accidental “teachers”—people who, for some reason or other, leave a lasting effect upon our characters. Martin was, without doubt, the first impor¬ tant influence in my life. He took the formless lump of clay that was Ann Fielding, and, setting it upon the pot¬ ter’s wheel, shaped it to its vague outline, gave some sug¬ gestion of purpose to what, up to that time, had been no more than a mass of dormant possibilities. To him I owe my first awakening to the mental joys of life, my first knowledge of music, art, literature. Inspired by our endless talks together, my fancy took its first brave flights into realms beyond the utmost limits of the narrow little world in which I lived. In short, I owe more to that first dear, generous friend of my childhood than I could ever adequately express, than he can ever possibly have guessed.

As our friendship deepened I came to be acquainted with the circumstances of his personal history. I learnt that his father had been a music teacher and his mother the daughter of impoverished country gentlefolk, and that both of them were now dead.

“We lived in a little house in Tunbridge Wells,” he told me, “and when my mother died, six months ago, I came to London because I thought I should have a better chance of earning a living—and also because the only friend I have, an old German violinist who was greatly attached to my father, lives at Brixton. My ambition is to be a violinist also—Herr Schiller has given me lessons since I was seven years old—but in the meantime I must live and so I went after any job I saw advertised until I got this one with your father. It isn’t what I’d choose, of course, but then ‘beggars can’t be choosers.’ ”

We were sitting on a rough wooden bench near the top of Dog Kennel Hill. It was early-closing day, a lovely evening in June, and we had taken our first walk together. As we sat staring over a bristling panorama of roofs and chimney-pots and church spires to where, in the distance, the sun struck patches of golden flame from the curved roof of the Crystal Palace ? I was conscious of a great outrush of sympathy towards this gentle-voiced, dreamyeyed man at my side. I was glad Fate had sent him to me for a friend. Already I felt that I understood him so well.

Impulsively I slipped an arm through his.

“I knew you weren’t a real shop assistant the very first moment I saw you,” I confided, “you’ve got quite a dif¬ ferent look. It must be very dull for you—serving stupid women with calico and flannelette, instead of playing your violin. But perhaps, one day, when you’ve saved up some money, you’ll be able to go away and be a real vio¬ linist and—and play at concerts and things.” I nodded several times as though the whole matter were a fore¬ gone conclusion. “Yes, of course, that is what you must do.”

He gave me a look that I shall never forget, a quick grateful flash out of his misty grey eyes. It was as though his very soul were thanking me.

“That’s what I want to do,” he replied. “That’s what I dream about night and day—what I’m living for! How did you guess?”

I gave his arm a little squeeze. I felt flattered and excited. I felt that he was treating me as an equal.

“I’m your friend,” I announced simply, “and friends always guess things about each other!”

Again his eyes sought mine. For a moment he did not

r

speak, then:

“You’re a wonderful kid!” he said. “You seem to be almost as much out of place as I am.”

I think my parents took rather a fancy to Martin. Al¬ though he may not have been exactly brilliant from a business point of view, he was so courteous, so painstak¬ ing, so obviously conscientious and eager to please that they could not very well have helped liking him. Also I think they were impressed by the superiority of his speech and manner. At any rate, they seemed quite undisturbed by our rapidly growing friendship and never attempted to put the slightest check upon our intercourse.

Thus it came about that we spent the greater part of all our free time together, such time consisting princi-

IO pally of Sundays and the evenings of early-closing days. We took long ’bus rides to such places as Richmond and Hampstead Heath and tramped for hours talking eagerly upon the most varied topics with a pleasure which some¬ how never seemed to flag.

Very early in our acquaintance Martin joined a library and began to bring me books to read, wonderful books that opened new windows in my mind and started me off down a thousand fresh channels of fascinating discovery. And when I had read them we talked about them.

Martin talked rather well in a jerky vivid way that I found especially pleasing. He was never exactly brilliant. Often he blundered helplessly after some word that eluded him. But he sketched, he hinted, he managed somehow to convey a general impression of the delicious mysteries awaiting me behind the curtain of the Future.

He talked best of all about music and his ambition to become a great artist. Upon this subject he never wearied; he lost all sense of restraint or self-conscious¬ ness and I, for my part, never grew tired of listening to him. Something about the electric quality of his en¬ thusiasm fired me to an answering eagerness. In time I grew almost to envy him, to wish I had an equally glorious career to look forward to.

I remember a certain evening in particular. We had taken a tram ride to the Victoria Embankment and were walking about the gardens listening to the music of a County Council band. It was already dusk and the fagades of the great hotels were aglow with amber light, whilst the lamps upon either side of the river hung like luminous beads upon invisible strings and dripped their shimmering reflections into the water below. It was a ii lovely night in early September, the sort of night when the sky is violet and all shadows have a suggestion of vel¬ vet and mystery about them, when the figures of lovers walking softly to and fro create an irresistible impres¬ sion of romance.

I think something of the atmosphere must have crept unconsciously into both our moods. We walked about feeling inexplicably adventurous, with a queer, reckless wonderment pricking and tingling in our blood.

“One day,” Martin said, and his voice beat like a passionate rhythm into the dreamy harmonies of a pop¬ ular waltz, “one day I’m going to get free of all this—this soulless servitude! One day I’m going to make people listen to me. I’m going to make them listen! Oh, little Ann, I wonder if you can understand all it means to me— this great hunger inside me—the excitement of it—the glorious intoxication—and sometimes the despair? . . . But it’s coming—one day, if only I’ve got the gift and patience to stick it out. Herr Schiller believes in me, and he knows! If only the waiting weren’t so tedious—and so long! This isn’t life! It’s stagnation! Sometimes I feel as though I were being held down and slowly strangled. Strangled! ’ ’

He broke off and stared down into my face as we passed within the radiance of a yellow patch of lamp¬ light.

“I wonder if you think that just nonsense—melodra¬ matic rubbish?” he inquired abruptly. “You’re such a wise little kid. You look at me with such comprehend¬ ing eyes—as though you quite understood. Do you, I wonder?”

“I think,” I replied, “that what you say you will do, you will do. If one wants anything very much, with all one’s heart, I think there is always a way of getting it. I want things also. I don’t know yet exactly what kind of things. But one day I shall know and then I shall get them. Oh, yes, I’m quite sure I shall get them.” And I nodded seriously several times.

For a while Martin did not reply; then—very slowly and thoughtfully he said:

“I wonder what bit of good fortune sent me to you? You’ve got the most convincing way of putting things. You seem to inspire me with a certainty of success. You give me the oddest feeling of confidence. I wonder why?”

As the autumn merged into winter and the weather became too cold for out-of-door excursions we went to picture galleries, museums and concerts instead. For the latter Martin was often able to obtain free passes through Herr Schiller, who played in the orchestra at Queen’s Hall. And once during January he had the good fortune to be given a couple of tickets for an opera at Covent Garden.

The piece was Madame Butterfly and to this day I remember the powerful effect it had upon me. From beginning to end I sat entranced, afraid to move or speak in case I should wake up and find it was all a dream.

On the way home I talked of it to Martin in tones of hushed reverence.

“I understand now why you want to be a musician,” I said. “I know what you mean when you say you will make people listen to you. All the time they were sing¬ ing I had a feeling that I wanted to keep very, very still— not to breathe almost—and, at the same time, I wanted to cry out, to shout, to make a noise that would drown everything and fill the whole world! Is that how you feel?”

He looked at me in the dim light of the swaying horse ’bus. His face seemed at once serious yet smiling.

“Something,” he said.

There was a pause, during which I stared blankly out at the moving pageant of Walworth Road. Suddenly I went on:

“I never knew before—that music could hurt!”

He nodded. v

“It can,” he said. “All beautiful things can hurt—if you’ve got that sort of nature. It’s like strange hands playing on the strings of our hearts. We can’t help re¬ sponding—we can’t control it in any way—but we don’t know what it is. I don’t suppose we ever could!”

It must have been shortly after this that Martin first made the hesitating proposal that I should go to his lodgings for the purpose of hearing him play.

“I can’t think of any other way,” he apologized. “And perhaps—just once wouldn’t matter. It’s not much of a place, only a sort of attic at the top of a house in Well¬ ington Street.”

I clapped my hands excitedly.

“Oh, what does that matter?” I cried. “I shan’t be going to see the room.”

“Well then—if you’re quite sure you won’t mind-?”

“But why should I? It won’t make any difference to your playing, will it?”

“Nothing that you’ll notice. But it wasn’t that I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing really. Nothing that could apply to you.”

And so it was settled, and on the following Sunday afternoon we went together to a house in a very shabby road near the Elephant and Castle. It was of the usual “lodging-house” variety, very dark and cramped and stuffy. The smell of fried fish and boiled vegetables and the sound of harshly disputing voices floated up beside me as I climbed several flights of stairs to a room that was no larger than a good-sized cupboard. It had bare boards, upon which lay one small, threadbare strip of car¬ pet; the wallpaper hung in torn shreds from the walls and sloping ceilings; a piece of dirty curtain flapped de¬ jectedly before the small open window, whilst the furni¬ ture consisted merely of a bed, a chair, a chest of draw¬ ers and a box.

Such things did not matter, however. In fact I scarcely noticed them as I sat upon the single rickety chair and listened, entranced, to the music which Martin seemed presently to be drawing from the very soul of his violin.

He stood with his head almost touching the ceiling, one piece of loose hair trailing limply down over his white brows, his whole expression one of intense, almost rap¬ turous delight. And as I listened a feeling of strange emotion came over me. Even the great pleasure which Madame Butterfly had given me was slight compared with the wild ecstasy of appreciation that now awoke in me. I don’t know what I had come prepared to hear. Certainly nothing so exquisitely beautiful as this.

After a while I found my gaze wandering from my friend’s face to the open window, where a piece of westi5 ern sky reddened slowly between stacks of soot-grimed chimney-pots. For the time being I seemed to lose my¬ self, to float, dreamy and quiescent, into the crimson glory of the evening sky. . . . Then, abruptly, the playing stopped and I came back almost violently to earth again.

From that time forward my belief in Martin’s genius, in the certainty of his ultimate success, became fixed and unalterable in my mind. I was disappointed when, for some reason that I could not discover, he refused ever to take me to his little attic room again.

“One day, if things go well, I’ll have a proper room of my own—and then you shall come as often as you like— little Ann,” he said. “But my bedroom isn’t a fit place for you. Your mother would be angry if she knew I took you.”

“But why?” I pleaded.

And then he smiled, a little sadly, a little wistfully.

“One day you’ll understand,” he said.

Chapter II

M V father’s prosperity continued to increase. Each year saw him a little better off, a little more firmly established in the ranks of successful middle-class tradesmen.

When I was thirteen he bought a private residence and we ceased to live over the shop.

“Laburnum Villa” was a large, old-fashioned, rather attractive-looking house in Dulwich. It stood in nearly half an acre of ground, had a carriage drive in front with pillars and carved stone urns guarding the door and alto¬ gether possessed an air of aristocratic, if somewhat de¬ cayed grandeur which I think must have influenced my parents very strongly in its favour.

Like most people of their class they were snobs at heart, and now that prosperity was bringing them leisure and a modest degree of affluence they were not long in revealing the fact. They developed a decided penchant for superficial refinement. They began to cast about for ways and means of increasing their self-respect, of build¬ ing up an illusion of that particular brand of “gentility” they so ardently and slavishly admired. The chance ac¬ quaintance with a retired naval captain and his wife— made over the garden wall in the process of borrowing a lawn-mower and cemented two days later over afternoon tea in the newly decorated, very much over-furnished drawing-room—lent a decided impetus to their budding

ambition^, My mother began to take in certain so-called i7

“society papers,” and sedulously to ape the supposed fashions and habits of the “upper classes”; whilst my father affected a diamond tie-pin and white spats, gave up pipe-smoking in favour of a particularly opulent brand of cigar and bought a dog-cart in which he drove osten¬ tatiously about on Sunday afternoons.

Finally, and most important of all from the point of view of my subsequent development, their attention be¬ came aroused to the all-important matter of their chil¬ dren’s education. They began to realize the necessity of providing us with the correct educational cachet suit¬ able to our improved prospects.

Of course Stephen came first in consideration. They decided that no money or pains should be spared over his conversion into “a thorough gentleman.” Eventually, through the influence of the impecunious naval captain, he was sent to Sherborne in the spring of 1904, it being an understood thing that I should follow on to some suit¬ able boarding-school in the autumn.

My brother’s departure was a great relief to me. The world became a freer, happier place. My various inter¬ ests seemed suddenly to widen and deepen in a quite sur¬ prising manner. I had the garden, which I grew to love and in which I spent a great deal of time; I had the steadily increasing library of books, which a generous supply of pocket money now permitted me to acquire, and I had my friendship with Martin Armstrong. In fact the summer which followed stands out in my mind as one of the pleasantest I ever remember. It was the summer in which I first became acquainted with the novels of Char¬ lotte Bronte and Charles Reade, and made my first blun¬ dering attempts to understand Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and Spencer’s “First Principles.” It was also the summer in which I first became possessed of a bicycle.

Martin had one also by this time, and we used to ride about a good deal together. How clearly it all comes back to me, those warm, delicious evenings when we spun out into the open country that stretches beyond Bromley and Catford into Kent! We were both full of health and ambition and an intense, throbbing desire to make some¬ thing of life. We talked in sweeping sentences of the future! We dreamed great dreams; we built glorious castles in the scented summer air. Without knowing the reason why, we were profoundly and intensely happy.

It was during these rides together that Martin first began to talk definitely of leaving the shop and making a bid for success as a violinist.

“I’ve been here eighteen months,” he told me one Sun¬ day afternoon as we sat upon a gate looking into a cherry orchard in full blossom. “Eighteen months! And every day of it’s been a struggle between what I’ve wanted to do and what I’ve felt was most sensible to do. But I think it’s time I made a move now. Max Schiller thinks he can help me to get into the orchestra of a West End theatre. That ’ud be quite a good beginning—splendid in fact—and I should try and get hold of some pupils— and do composition. Oh, I think there’s a chance if only I stick tight and don’t get disheartened to begin with. . . . I’m quite prepared for it to be difficult, but it’ll be work I shall like doing. I shall have my heart in it. And I’ve managed to save up a little money in case things don’t go too well at first. Yes, the more I think about it the more I think it’s time I took the plunge.”

Staring at the cherry trees I answered:

“I think you’re right, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t be successful. A shop isn’t the right place for you. It must make you feel sometimes as if you were in prison.”