The Pathos of the Commonplace

by Barry Pain

The Pathos
of the
Commonplace.

By BARRY PAIN

 

HE was a middle-aged man when he first came to the town. He had taken an appointment as clerk to a firm of solicitors, and he was happy in that appointment, regarding it as a step upwards. He was small in stature and wild in manner. His eyes had a hesitating look in them, and he pressed his thin lips tightly together, as though to counterbalance his look of hesitation and make himself appear rather firm. He found himself furnished apartments in a house that was one of a row on the very outskirts of the great town. They were two rooms at the top of the house, small and shabbily furnished, looking out on a piece of waste-land at the back. On this piece of waste-land there was one large tree growing. At the time when he first took the rooms he was talkative, and told the landlady all about himself.

“My name is Peters. You see, I’ve just got a step upwards rather, by being appointed clerk to Grantham and Flynders. Formerly, I used to keep the books for Flynders’s cousin, who’s a grocer in a small way at Melstowe—oh, quite a comparatively small way.”

“Really now,” said Mrs. Marks, a good woman, but not always logical; “and then for this Flynders to give himself those airs—and his cousin no more than that! Ah! I’ve many a time said that half the world doesn’t know who the other half’s relations are!”

“So it is,” replied Peters. “I may say—I think I may say—that I’ve done a good deal for Flynders’s cousin. He’s taken my advice more than once, notably in an extension of the counter-trade in effervescents during the hot weather, and he’s found it pay him. Well, he knew that I could do a good deal better than I was doing. I’d taught myself things, you see. There was shorthand, now. At Melstowe my shorthand was, if it’s not to use too strong a term, going to rot, simply going to rot—in a grocery and general, there’s no use for it. I pointed that all out to Flynders’s cousin, and he—being good-natured and seeing what I was—got me this berth with this Flynders himself. So I left Melstowe, and I left Flynders’s cousin—left him, thanks to me, doing to my certain knowledge some gross more in the lemonade than he had ever done in the past.” Peters paused, and looked proud of himself. “Mind,” he went on, rather weakly, “I’m telling you all this not from any—any desire to tell any one anything, but because I may be giving up these rooms in two or three years, or even less. You see, I’ve taken one of those steps upwards that may lead to anything. In a post like mine, you just work yourself up and work yourself up. Starting with what I may call family influence, and having rather a strong natural turn, I may be made managing clerk in no time, then, perhaps, Flynders dies, and I’m took in. ‘Grantham and Peters’ wouldn’t sound bad. Only then, of course, I shouldn’t keep these rooms—I should be taking a house of my own.”

Mrs. Marks considered this, not unjustly, to be a little wild. But it was cheaper always to humour a lodger; and she mostly chose the cheapest. “Then you’d be getting married,” she said.

“Under the circumstances I should ask Flynders’s cousin’s second daughter to—to——”

“To consider it,” suggested the landlady.

“To re-consider it,” said Peters, sadly and correctively. He had a nervous anxiety to get away from the subject. He glanced out of the window. “I call that a pleasant look-out,” he said. “Being high up, and that sycamore touching the window nearly, it ain’t unlike Zaccheus.”

“That’s no sycamore, Mr. Peters. It’s a plane.”

“I don’t know about such things. I ain’t a talker as a rule. It may be that I’m a bit excited at entering on a new sp’ere, a sp’ere from which much may be hoped. Not for worlds would I have ’em know in the office that I’ve got ambitions—oh, no!”

The landlady moved to the door. “Will there be anything else now?”

“A little tea, if it’s not too much trouble,” said Peters. “I have a partiality for tea.”

“You shall have it,” said Mrs. Marks. She did a good deal with the manner and the tone of the voice. Peters vaguely understood that all this was exceptional, and must not occur again; he must not make a practice of taking up Mrs. Marks’s precious time by sheer garrulousness; and he must not get into the habit of ordering tea or anything else that he wanted—he must wait until it was brought to him spontaneously. He began to unpack his few belongings, and put them away neatly. He had a picture—an engraving that he had purchased, ready framed, in Melstowe. It represented David playing before Saul. He hung it over the mantelpiece. Beneath stood a partly-decayed model of a Swiss mountain and chalet, protected by a glass case.

When everything was tidy, Peters sat down and drank his tea, and thought about his ambitions.

•••••

Now Mr. Peters, as will have been gathered, was as ignorant as a child of the manner in which promotion takes place in a solicitor’s office, and of the fact that he had no chance whatever. He was conscientious and patient, and could do mechanical work; he was quite regular. Some men can do a thing one day which they cannot do on the next, but Peters was never unexpected. He was invariable in his merits, and in his incompetence. With him Nature had drawn a line, and said, “Peters, you are never going beyond that.”

His disappointment dawned very slowly upon him. He found that a solicitor’s office was not what he had supposed it to be. Neither Grantham nor Flynders was at all by way of being intimate with him; in fact, they rarely spoke to him, except to dictate a letter; it was the managing clerk who told him what to do, and he always did it as well as he could, and that was never very well, nor very badly. Sometimes he thought with regret of the nearly social terms upon which he had been with Flynders’s cousin; Flynders’s cousin had taken his advice about the lemonade. Now he was not on social terms with anybody. He was not good at making friends. He did not get on very well with the other clerks. They were not serious; they played practical jokes upon him, which he took, as a rule, with his accustomed mildness; once or twice he lost his temper, and then he was undignified but very funny.

His position was not in any danger. He was careful, methodical, punctual. It was only that his step upwards had been the last step that he was able to take in that direction. He had found his level. In the first few months of his appointment he had purchased a large law-book second hand. He picked that one because it was so very cheap, and it was so very cheap because it was also so very obsolete; but Peters did not know this. He studied his book, without entirely understanding it, by the light of an evil-smelling lamp in the long evenings. When his disappointment had finally dawned upon him, he took the book back to the second hand bookseller, and tried to get him to purchase it again; but that was of no use. It had taken the second-hand man some years to sell that book once, and he did not feel inclined to recommence the struggle. So Peters put it up on a shelf, and did his best to forget it. Now he read Mrs. Marks’s newspaper (she obliged him with the loan of it) in the evening. On one occasion another clerk lent him something described as a regular spicy novel. Peters read a few pages, but he did not like it, and gave it back.

He began to be sorry that on his first arrival he had been so confidential with his landlady; he had given her a false impression, and he must correct it. So one day he mentioned to her that he had relinquished the notion of a partnership.

“Ah, yes,” she said. She had quite forgotten about it, but one must verbally humour lodgers. Besides, she had an apposite observation to make. “Eve often remarked,” she said, “that if we could all have everything we wanted, there wouldn’t be enough to go round.”

Peters felt a little lonely. One day was very much like another. He always went to bed at the same time, and always rose at the same time. His life seemed to be going on by machinery with himself left out of it. He had a fancy that it was the plane-tree which woke him in the morning; its boughs touched lightly against his window sometimes when the wind blew. He was rather attached to that tree. In the summer it looked so cool and pleasant. There was a door at the back of the house, leading on to that piece of waste-land, and he would have liked to have gone outside and sat under the tree in the hot weather. But he doubted if he had any right to use that back-door. He had a right to his two rooms and to the front-door and staircase which led to them; but he was doubtful about the back-door. On one or two occasions he had inadvertently exceeded his rights, and Mrs. Marks had seemed to him rather put out. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Marks was very well satisfied with him. He was a good lodger, gave no trouble, and paid his book punctually; he rarely rang, never seemed to mind if the bell was not answered, went to church twice every Sunday, and was a credit to the house. He was an economical man, and was putting by a little money. He had a small sum of his own—£20 a year—that his father had left him, or, as he preferred to call it, a certain private income independent of his salary. The days went on; the old tree looked in at his window and seemed interested in him, and he was interested in the tree, noting the way it took the seasons. Otherwise there was nothing, and it was rather lonely.

And then one day Mrs. Marks brought him a piece of news. Her little niece, Elsa, was coming to spend a holiday with her. She thought she would mention it, because there were some lodgers who objected to children.

Of course, Peters was delighted to say that he did not object to children at all. “Oh, and about that back-door, Mrs Marks,” he added. “I’ve sometimes thought I’d like to make use of it, so as to sit out under that tree of a warm evening.”

“Most certainly, Mr. Peters, and no need to ask either.”

•••••

Under the plane-tree Peters found a thin girl, with a white dress, black stockings, yellow hair, and a large doll. He gazed at her mildly:

“Are you Elsa?”

“Yes. Are you the lodger?”

“Yes.” He paused for want of ideas, and added that it was a fine Saturday afternoon.

She had much more self-possession than he had. She looked at him critically. “Were you going to sit out here, lodger?”

“I had been thinking of it.”

“Well, do it then.”

He sat down beside her, and said that she had a nice doll.

“Yes; its name is Mrs. Markham. I’m giving her up, because I’m nearly nine, and it’s silly to keep on with dolls when you’re nearly grown up. I used to have six dolls, and I’ve given them all up except Mrs. Markham. She’ll have to go too.”

“I say, how do you play with dolls?”

“You pretend things. Can you do that?”

“Bless you, yes!” said Peters, cheerfully. “I can pretend anything you like. What shall it be?”

“Let’s pretend it’s night.”

“All right. It’s night. And what do you do then?” '

“Well, if it’s night, of course we must put Mrs. Markham to bed. I’ve got her night-dress in my pocket.” She pulled it out and smoothed it on her knee. “Now I must undress her.” But she did not do it; she sat quite still, humming a little tune, while Peters watched her with interest.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked.

“I’m waiting,” she said, with some severity, “for you to look the other way. I can’t undress Mrs. Markham while you’re staring at her.”

Peters blushed, apologised, and looked the other way. Presently, he was told that he might turn round again; Mrs. Markham was properly attired, and asleep, with her head supported by part of a brick.

“Capital!” exclaimed Peters.

“Hush!” said Elsa, reproachfully. “It doesn’t seem as if you could pretend very well. Mrs. Markham’s asleep, and so we must speak in whispers. Now what are you, besides being a lodger?”

“I’m a clerk to a firm of solicitors,” Peters replied, in the repressed and husky voice enjoined upon him.

“That all?”

“I’m afraid so. I had expected to be one of the firm, but there are difficulties. It seems to be usual for a solicitor to be articled, and I doubt if the firm will see its way to——”

Elsa yawned and interrupted. “That’ll do. This isn’t any good. Let’s play at something else. Can’t you think of anything?”

Peters had an idea. He passed a small confectioner’s shop on his way from business, and he had observed and remembered a label in the window.

“Look here, Elsa, do you think you could manage a liquorice jujube?”

Elsa looked down at the grass and waggled one foot nervously; her eyes seemed to get larger.

“Yes, thank you,” she said demurely, “I think I could.”

So they went off to the confectioner’s shop. Peters cross-examined the woman behind the counter almost imperiously, as to the presence of deleterious mineral colouring-matter in the desired sweetmeat. The woman answered him with cold confidence:

“The liquorice jujube takes its colour from the liquorice, which is a vegetable and wholesome.”

Then the purchase was made, and they sauntered back—Elsa slowly becoming sticky, and Peters smiling abundantly.

•••••

Peters was lonely no longer while Elsa’s holiday lasted. As a rule she made suggestions, and he acted upon them. She wanted to know why he never went on the river; so one afternoon he took her. A man from the boat-house rowed them.

“Why don’t you row yourself?” asked Elsa.

“Because,” Peters answered, as he ran the boat’s nose hard into a thorn bush, “I have to steer. Mind your head—I took that a little too close.”

The man from the boat-house backed them out. Similar incidents had occurred frequently since Peters took the lines. At the boatman’s suggestion he now relinquished them.

In the course of her holiday Mrs. Markham, so Elsa said, died; she was buried under the plane-tree. Peters dug the grave with his pocket-knife and a portion of a broken tea-cup. When the funeral service was over Peters produced a toy cricket set, and proposed a game. Elsa went in, and Peters bowled. After an hour and a half she retired hot; she was not out. Peters had bowled her twice, but on each occasion the ball was disqualified by the umpire. Elsa was the umpire. On the first occasion he had forgotten to say play, and on the second he had bowled faster than the rules of cricket permitted. Peters did not get an innings—that was characteristic of him.

On Sundays Peters took Elsa to church. She refused to go more than once a Sunday, because her father went only once; if she went twice, she explained, it would be like saying that her father was a bad man; and he was a very good man. Peters asked her what prayers she said night and morning.

“I used to have special ones,” she said, “but I’ve forgotten them. Besides, I’m too old for them; they were baby things. Now I say any colic out of the prayer-book. They’re all good.”

“I don’t think that’s quite right,” said Peters.

“Pa,” she observed, with subtle relevancy, “used to say that all s’listers were liars.”

“Well, I’m not a solicitor,” Peters objected, triumphantly.

He remembered two prayers for morning and evening that he had learned when he was a boy. He copied them out in an exquisite hand, with Old English titles, on a sheet of tinted cardboard. Then he ruled a frame round them—three thin red lines within a broad black line. He was proud of his work. He presented it to Elsa. The wayward Elsa chose to be pleased with it, and owned that Peters wrote better than she did. She took the card away to her room at once—“to try them,” she explained.

•••••

Peters found himself very dull indeed when Elsa had gone. He thought it over, and concluded that he was a man who needed companionship. One night he wrote a long letter—not a love-letter—to Flynders’s cousin’s second daughter, and posted it; he got no reply, and a few months afterwards he read in Mrs. Marks’s newspaper the announcement that Flynders’s cousin’s second daughter had married the curate.

“She was always one for social success,” Peters reflected.

He wrote to Elsa, and she also did not answer—she had explained to him that he must not expect it, because she disliked writing letters. He sent her every year a birthday card (with a present), a Christmas card (also with a present), and a valentine. She sent him, so far as he knew, nothing at all; but one year he received a very ugly valentine, an insulting valentine. He thought that it must have come either from Elsa or from that young clerk who had lent him the really spicy novel.

One day that young clerk seemed almost friendly to Peters. “You’re a lonely old chap,” he said to him in the luncheon hour. “Why don’t you buy a dog? It would be a companion to you.” Peters thought it rather a good idea. As it happened, the young clerk had one that he wanted to sell; he described it as a faithful, pure-bred, sweet-tempered fox-terrier. It’s name was Tommy. Peters bought it, and its kennel was located under the plane-tree.

Tommy liked almost every one except Peters. He would follow any one except Peters. If he was in the mood to snap at anybody, he preferred to snap at Peters. Mrs. Marks (under a special pecuniary arrangement) agreed to wash the dog. But she soon pleaded for the use of a muzzle on those occasions. “What with holding of him with one hand and being afraid of him biting me with the other, I can’t do it unless he’s muzzled.”

Peters thought that muzzles were inhuman, and said that he would wash the dog himself. The first time he tried Tommy bit him in three places, and escaped before the operation was over. He bolted into the street, ran away, and never came back.

So Peters was quite alone. Mrs. Marks was too busy to talk to him. Elsa did not come back. But the old plane-tree did not seem to mind him.

•••••

As the years went on, Peters found that he got old very quickly. One of the effects of age, in his case, was a violent pain in the chest, which came on after any great exertion or if he walked fast uphill. He went for a holiday—a week at Hunstanton—but it did not seem to do him much good. But when he came back, he heard glorious news. Elsa was coming again for a few days.

“Now I’m glad,” said Peters. “I always liked the child. Such bright ways she had! We shall soon be playing cricket together again.”

“Why, you forget, Mr. Peters,” said Mrs. Marks, “Elsa’s near seventeen now. Besides, you're too much of an invalid to think of running about. You’ve aged.” Mrs. Marks herself did not age; she was one of those hard, wiry women that are capable of looking forty for twenty years.

Elsa looked very pretty. She still wore her hair down, but her dresses were much longer. She had a very superior manner, and did not seem particularly glad to see Peters. She took one of the liquorice jujubes that he offered her. But she explained that she did not care about that sort now; she only liked the best chocolates. “You can’t get them here. If you want to give me anything, Mr. Peters, there’s a blouse (two-and-eleven) in Higginson’s window that would do me nicely.”

He looked a little bewildered, but he bought her the blouse, and it did her very nicely indeed—so nicely that she thought it was a pity that she was not to be photographed in it. “We might be photographed together,” she said, alluringly; “I shouldn’t want more than two copies—cabinets.”

This was better. Peters was pleased that she wanted him to be photographed with her. The photographer placed her on a rustic stile, with Peters standing by her side. He smiled widely and with feeling, as he looked at her. She shook her head impatiently. “Oh, this won’t do!” she said, “your grinning puts me out. Besides, you shake the stile. I wish you’d stand away, and let me be done alone. Then you can have yourself took afterwards.”

So Peters stood away, meekly. But on the whole he did not think it worth while to have himself taken afterwards.

The two copies arrived, and satisfied Elsa. “Though I’ve known myself look better,” she said. One copy was for herself, and the other she destined for a particular friend. Peters had bought a plush frame, supposing that she had intended to give him one copy; well, that did not matter; he could order a third from the photographer. In the meantime he was required to pack up the photograph for the particular friend.

“It would travel safer,” he said, “if you packed it between a couple of pieces of card.”

Elsa looked thoughtful. “I’ve got an old bit in my writing-case,” she said. “Go and fetch it, Mr. Peters.”

He hunted through the writing-case, but could not find it.

“Well, I know it’s there, anyhow,” she retorted. “I kept it, knowing it would come in some day. It’s got those prayers on it that you wrote out for me when I was here before.”

“Oh, yes, I saw that. I didn’t think——”

“Well, never mind, I’ll go and get it myself; torn in half, it will just do. It will puzzle my friend, though—he’s not one of the praying sort.”

Peters was guilty of looking somewhat despondent as he moved away; this made Elsa rather angry. “You needn’t look so glum,” she said; “you didn’t expect me to keep it all my life, and have it buried with me—silly old card—did you?”

•••••

“One thing I will say,” Mrs. Marks observed, after Elsa had gone, “is that she does brighten up a house. And I hope her looks mayn’t be a snare to her. She has one young admirer already, and she a mere child! She’s promised to come again next year. I hope you’ll get on better with her then. You seemed more stand-offish this time—you’ve no complaint against her?”

“Oh, no! certainly not.”

“You’re not looking well, Mr. Peters. You’ll excuse my mentioning it, but you want a doctor.”

Peters shook his head slowly, but owned to a touch of something—probably liver. It was Sunday evening, and he had been intending to go to church as usual. But he changed his mind. He did not feel up to it. He sat under the plane-tree, and thought about Elsa as she used to be before she grew up.

He knew that old tree well now, knew every twist of the branches, every kink of the bark. In an unreasoning way he loved the tree. It had never repulsed him; it had always been there for him.

Mrs. Marks was right. Peters did want a doctor. He took to fainting when he was at work at the office. He apologised for it to the senior partner, who had found him unconscious, and promised that it should not occur again. But it did. One morning he was summoned to the senior partner’s private room. Grantham and Flynders were both there. They told him that he had been for many years a faithful servant to them, and that now—when he was past work—they wanted to mark their sense of his services. He was not to come to the office any more, but they named a sum which would be paid him by way of pension for the rest of his life. And they advised him to see a doctor.

Peters could not understand it, and it had to be explained to him again. Then he tried to thank them. He felt proud and tremulous. He had been praised—it was years since anybody had praised him. He walked home and told Mrs. Marks about it. He was not to work any more. Grantham and Flynders had praised him very highly. And he had a pension. And Mrs. Marks congratulated him, and said that he deserved his luck. And finally Peters broke down and wept.

•••••

Peters spent most of his days, doing absolutely nothing, stretched on the grass under the plane-tree. He had grown rather queer in one or two points. Mrs. Marks could not make him believe that the strip of land was to be built over, and that the tree would have to come down. He did not argue about it. He merely said: “they shall not cut that tree down. I shall see about it.”

“Now that is silly, Mr. Peters. The tree will come down before they begin to build.”

“No, it will not,” said Peters.

One day, while Peters was lying under the tree, a party of men came and took measurements, and cut lines in the turf, but they did not attempt to touch the tree. Peters chuckled.

But next morning he was awakened by a sound of sawing. A party of labourers had come early, and were at work on the tree, sawing off the heavy lower boughs. Peters leant half out of the window in his night-shirt and shook his fist at them. He was wild with excitement.

“Leave my tree alone!” he screamed.

The men stopped work for a minute. Two of them laughed. One of them shouted up to him,

“Hold your row, you old fool! It ain’t your tree.”

“It is mine,” cried Peters. “I shall come down to you and stop you. I’m coming now.” Then he fell back on the bed, fainting.

Mrs. Marks was much alarmed, and—whether Peters liked it or not—insisted on having a doctor.

When the doctor came down stairs she met him in the passage. “Well, sir? she said.

“I can do nothing—might have done if I’d been called in years ago. It’s the heart. He can’t last long. Don’t let him be excited, and I’ll send you something to give him for these fainting attacks.”

Mrs. Marks was a hard woman, but she wiped her eyes with her apron. “He’s been here so long you see,” she explained.

•••••

Peters protested against the doctor. It was a foolish expense, if he was certain to die.

“I’ve got a little put by—yes, that’s true. But it’s all to go to Elsa, you see, and I don’t want any of it wasted.”

The blinds were drawn in order that he might not be excited by seeing the felling of the tree; but he could hear the work going on, though he pressed his thin hands to his ears.

As the sun shone in at his window one morning, and he lay awake in bed, a big, swift shadow swept across the blind, and then came a deafening crash.

Peters half raised himself in bed, one hand on his heart. His voice came in a whisper: “My God!”

He sank quite gently back again on the bed, and did not move.