Fowlers End (11 page)

“I’ll stick close for a week or two,” said Copper Baldwin. “It’d be a shame to lose you just yet. Only remember what I said: if you want anything, come to me. Before going to Sam Yudenow for a few shillings, go to the carsey, lift up the seat, cut your throat, chuck yourself down the ‘ole, and pull the plug.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

So we went back to the Pantheon, while Copper Baldwin said under his breath, “Religious, is it? We’ll see about that, cocko!”

I had said it only to tease him, but I believe now that I was right, in a way.

Promiscuous haters get religion as promiscuous lovers get clap. At is a kind of occupational disease which they make a virtue of—you aren’t a man until you’ve had it. The getting of religion by a nater is the sickly consummation of a masturbatory marriage: previously, he only flirted and fumbled himself in dark corners, but, having got religion, he is publicly himself to have and to hold, legally free to worry himself to death. Consider, for example, the sour sighs of such joyless acid-throwing, self-damnatory Holy Rollers as Dostoevski, Graham Greene, Tolstoy, Evelyn Waugh, and other self-
digesters of all denominations, dutifully saving their own muck for orgies of mirror-pelting. Their hate got too strong for them, so that mere doubt became insipid. Hate is very lonely; nobody understands it. Love is never frustrated, but hate always is—it is never fulfilled, it wants always to be warmed and cosseted; but it has only its own bosom to fall back upon. So it goes mad; calls itself God, justifies itself, fears itself, adores itself; flagellates itself, licks itself into a shell of scar tissue, and forgives itself. Then, suspecting itself, it hires private detec
tives to catch itself being unfaithful to itself—and writes an indignant book about itself. Result? Literature.

In writing of myself I forgot to mention that I have a most extraordinary gift of repartee. I can always find the
mot juste,
the witty riposte, the devastating rejoinder—only it comes out ten or fifteen minutes too late. So now, on the very steps of the Pantheon, I said, “I mean to say, Copper, after all, if it’s
reality
you’re after, why read books? What do you want them for? You
are
reality—you’re
living
it. Reading is a waste of time. So are pictures. So is talking. So is Yudenow; you can’t see him, because your eyes distort and your brain’s only a photographic plate that might be
off-color. You know, Copper, light is only algebra, love and hate are only biochemistry, you and Yudenow are simply a couple of formulae—it’s all mapped out and sewn up for you in red tape. Nice and easy, Copper—all you want is a label; paste it on and post yourself! You are all mixed up between naturalism and nature, and candor and truth—that’s what you are, Copper. And you know what a ‘realist’ is? A destructive romantic, a sort of hen-pecked husband at a carnival who pays sixpence for the privilege of throwing little wooden balls at threepenny-worth of saucers. What is real is the good
and the true and the beautiful—and that is a hunger and a love.”

“‘Ave you eaten yet this morning?”

“Why?”

“You should ‘ave ‘ad a sandwich,” said Copper Baldwin, with his sour smile. “‘Unger, love, et cetera. A fat lot you know about that, I bet.”

If there had been time, I would have told Copper Baldwin that I knew a devil of a lot about all kinds of things. I might have said, for example, that, young as I was, hunger had already led me into crime, and thence to love; and that this love was leading me back to crime again; and
that the whole mess had its germ in sheer stubborn pride. By “crime” I do not mean anything that would cast a man out from decent society. It depends, of course, what you mean by “decent society.” Decency, in society, is measured in strange ways. It is weighed in terms according to your capacity to foot the bill. Innocence goes in inverse proportion to need. If a tramp knocks a rich man down and takes his wallet, that is robbery with violence; if a rich man knocks a tramp down and takes his hat, that is an escapade.

It had happened two years before, when I was still in my twenty-second year and had already frittered away my tiny patrimony in a crackbrained money-making scheme that had been evolved in a Soho cafe by a man named Barron (or, as I put it, “lost my small fortune by untimely speculation”). I used to spend night after night in the cafes around Old Compton Street listening to all kinds of interesting conversation. Barron fascinated me. There was something godlike about the man’s tremendous scorn for the reading public—and for the writing public, and the arithmetic public too, for that m
atter. He could prove, conclusively, that everyone was a fool. According to him, he got a living out of the bigger bookshops in Charing Cross Road. The process was so simple that I wondered why everybody didn’t do it: all you did was walk in, go to the Latest Biographies shelves, pick up a twenty-five-shilling book, carry it without paying for it, of course, to the Books Bought Department on the second floor, and sell it for half a guinea. The booksellers hugged themselves at the thought of having cheated you, you hugged yourself at the thought of having cheated the booksellers, and everybody was happ
y.

Another trick of Barron’s, which he confided to me, was equally simple and, by his irresistibly persuasive reasoning, highly moral. He would put on a pair of earrings and, carrying some cigar boxes under his arm, stand outside
some newly opened shop, scratching his head and looking hopelessly bewildered. Eventually the shopkeeper would ask him if he could be of any assistance; whereupon Barron, simulating acute embarrassment, would say that he was looking for a man named Rose who used to live there—you know,
Mister
Rose, the connoisseur of fine cigars. He, Barron, was a seafaring man just back from Cuba and had smuggled past the Customs a matter of two hundred and fifty fine Coronas worth five shillings apiece, which Mr. Rose generally took off him for a fiver the lot. It was highly illegal, of course, a
nd strictly hush-hush. But with no Mr. Rose, what the devil was he going to do with all these fine cigars? Would the gentleman like to try one and see? The gentleman would, and the gentleman did, and ended by beating the poor old seafaring man down to three pounds for five cigar boxes full of brown paper. (Why brown paper, God knows; somehow, Barron made it sound cleverer that way.) He was full of such tricks; as he talked of them in his haughty drawl they sounded, as it were, evangelic—he was a kind of practical missionary demonstrating that dishonesty does not pay. You do not have to cheat peop
le, he told me; leave them alone and they will cheat themselves....

But he had a legitimate scheme for making money,
real
money, he told me. What was the one thing a person borrowed that he invariably returned? A book. Why did he return this book to a library? Because there was always a crying need for something trashy to read. Start Circulating Libraries, said Barron, stocked with popular tripe, all in their dust jackets with celluloid covers; twopence per volume per week and no deposit! There was a fortune in that. Ninety per cent of the buying would be on credit, of course; that was easy; one had only to start a limited company with a registered office and
embossed notepaper. Heavily embossed. Even the stationery could be got on credit, and the shelves, filing cabinets, et cetera. Unhappily, ready cash
was needed for the rent of premises in populous areas—in the City, for example, where clerks and typists worked; and in the suburbs where, starved for love and adventure, they dreamed away their evenings over the claptrap of Rafael Sabatini and Jeffrey Farnol, and the musky goosh of Elinor Glyn and Ethel M. Dell.... As Barron calculated, such an investment would pay about ninety-five shillings in the pound—not fantastic, perhaps, but steady. All the proprietor would have to do would be ride from branch to branch and collect the takings in a heavy leather bag. You would need a safe, of course;
but that was one thing you could always get on credit. Nobody ever ran away with a safe....

The idea enchanted me. And so it came to pass, one bitter Saturday six months later, that I found myself faint with hunger in the British Museum with nothing in my pocket but a dirty handkerchief and that feeling of sick desperation in the heart that comes to a healthy young man when he has slept out of doors and had nothing to eat for seventy-two hours. It seems that Barron had met a helpless old lady in a Temperance Hotel near Russell Square. She had three hundred and fifty pounds in golden sovereigns saved up. Someone had told her that the surrender value of a golden pound was n
ow twenty-five shillings. Did Barron know of an honest goldsmith? Now the value of a sovereign had risen almost overnight to twenty-eight and sixpence. Barron bought the old lady’s hoard for twenty-five shillings apiece. When he opened the wash-leather bag he found three hundred and fifty of those lead disks with which tailors used to weight women’s skirts. The old lady from the country, I may add, turned out to be an ex-girlfriend of Eddie Guerin’s, a notorious character who sold the diamonds out of her front teeth to help him escape from Devil’s Island and later, in France, was acquitt
ed by an emotional jury on a charge of killing her mulatto lover by throwing him off the Eiffel Tower. But Barron, it transpired, was not
a trickster at all; he was an unemployed shorthand writer out of Temple Bar who lived on the earnings of his mother, who had a little hand laundry in Paradise Street, Marylebone. That is how I lost the thousand pounds I inherited from my grandmother when I came of age. We did open the “main branch” of Laverock Libraries Limited, off High Holborn, and did, indeed, a brisk business. Fourteen hundred books were borrowed in the first day. Only ninety-seven were returned, and three of these were hopelessly stained with tea-and-cocoa rings.

I took this failure hard. The loss of the money did not move me very deeply; after all, I hadn’t really seen it, and didn’t know it, except to say hello and good-by to. But my pride was hurt. When I came home one day and told my mother that I was going to put my capital into a chain of Circulating Libraries, she said something like “I don’t know anything at all about anything whatsoever, Daniel; but in the very nature of things, whatever you do of your own initiative must lead to disaster in the end. Your arguments are perfectly sound, I am sure. But for goodness gracious sake, don’t, unless y
ou are determined to bring my gray hairs in sorrow to the grave—which may be at any moment now....” Then she went behind my back and called in my Uncle Hugh, who, when I told him what I intended to do, sniffed suspiciously at my breath and said in effect, “I am thirty-five years older than you, and therefore know better. I have spent thirty years in the City, and I can assure you that it won’t work.”

When I said, with some bitterness, “They laughed at Marconi, too,” he replied, “And rightly so—the fellow got roundly swindled, and serves him right. You can take it from me, young man—and, as a solicitor, I may claim to have some experience of human nature—nobody who gets a brand-new seven-and-six-penny book for twopence down and no deposit is ever going to return it.” I told him that this
was unthinkable because
Property of Laverock Libraries Limited
would be plainly marked in every volume with a rubber stamp. He laughed at that, and my poor mother, clutching at a word, kept saying, “Oh, Daniel, you must have a deposit!”

Then my Uncle Hugh said, “My advice to you, my boy, is this: Put that thousand pounds of yours into Fabricated Utilities and leave it there two years. Meanwhile, we’ll get you a job with prospects. Otherwise, I can see you spending the night in jail for stealing apples off a barrow. This Mr. Barron of yours is evidently nothing but a petty adventurer.” I cried out that he was nothing of the sort, and my mother said, “He may be a nice man, but!” I shouted that Barron was not a very nice man and there were to be no buts. Uncle Hugh said, “Oh, very well, Daniel, throw away
your thousand pounds, and then, perhaps, you’ll take my advice.”

My mother cried, “Oh, Daniel, don’t throw away your thousand pounds. Do take your Uncle Hugh’s advice!”

“I will follow my instincts,” I said. “They laughed at Sir Isaac Newton.”

My uncle said, “And quite right, too, since the merest German Jew—one Einstein—has proved him wrong!”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Figures prove it,” said my Uncle Hugh. “There is a
law,
Daniel, a certain law.”

After some thought, I said, “Look at the Middle Ages!” But my Uncle Hugh said that these were not the Middle Ages, and that this was the time to buy Fabricated Utilities at 1 1/4. My mother cried, “Buy Fabricated Utilities, Daniel, if only a few!” But I would not. In eighteen months, the Ordinary shares of Fabricated Utilities rose from 1 1/4 to 8 3/4, and I bitterly regretted never having listened to my Uncle Hugh’s excellent advice. Everything was as he had foreseen it; and even my mother was right. I
became an outcast, a wanderer. I became a Minority of One, with only myself to consider. Pride took hold of me. If I had gone to my Uncle Hugh and said, “All right, Uncle, you were right and I was wrong. Let’s have that job,” he would have taken me to lunch at Sweeting’s and staked me to a couple of new suits; and my mother, writin
g off a pigheaded streak in me to the debit of my father’s ancestors, would have thanked God that everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

But I could not do it. It wasn’t in me to go back with my tail between my legs. If my Uncle Hugh had only known it, I had given him the wherewithal to say, “I told you so,” and with a vengeance
. But I took good care that he should not know it. There is something humiliating, sometimes, in a display of penitence; and always something disgusting in a show of misery. It corrupts, it is indecent, it is bad for the soul.

Live or die your own way, I say.

To paraphrase Mark Twain: The next person who saves my life does so over my dead body....