CHAPTER IV

DESCRIBING MR. AND MRS. DUCKIE, ALF PINTO, BEATRICE, AND ERN

Mrs. Duckie has only one fault. Her virtues are many, chief among them an almost fervid cleanliness, displaying itself in the spotlessness of the rooms and an affection for fresh towels that is Continental--certainly very un-English. She believes, too, in open windows, to a point inconceivable in a retired cook.

But she has a fault, and that is talkativeness--more than talkativeness, for she spins a kind of gummy web of words from which the listener, unless he is more ruthless than I can be, has the greatest difficulty in disentangling himself. The law of association governing her mind, as it does that of so many feminine talkers, one thing leads to another. To me, who have nothing to do--who am out, so to speak, for no other purpose than to occupy a stall in the theatre of life and watch the play--this does not matter very much, and I have already learned the trick of listening with one ear only, and making by a natural reflex action the expected sounds due from common politeness; but I can imagine it driving another and busier man mad, and I wonder what Mr. Dabney's short way with her is.

Mrs. Duckie's family consists of three children and a husband. They are quite prosperous, for two of the children, now grown up, keep themselves, and Mr. Duckie does well enough as head waiter in a Fleet Street chop house of the old type. The eldest son indeed more than keeps himself, for he has latterly become a celebrity and earns the income of at least an Under Secretary--almost that of the President of the Local Government Board, to whom I have no doubt he has in his time made many successful sarcastic allusions. For Herbert Duckie (to give him his baptismal name) is a music-hall singer.

The mild syllables uttered over the child by the curate at the font some five-and-twenty years ago are, however, unknown to London, on whose placards Herbert Duckie figures more provocatively as Alf Pinto. Of this pseudonym his mother is rightly proud, for there is more in it than meets the casual eye. Much thought went to its architecture, Alf standing not only for an abbreviation of Alfred, but signifying also a moiety, and Pinto being pronounced humorously by the initiate with the "i" long--thus convivially suggesting a measure of the national beverage. The joke is not original, I fear, for I remember it in a delightful travesty of poor Ouida; but it seems to have been genuinely evolved afresh by young Duckie and his friends.

His father and mother are naturally proud of him, for in addition to his fame and his considerable salary, he has the kindly filial habit of driving up to the house on fine Sunday afternoons in a dogcart and taking some of the family noticeably in it to Epping, or the Welsh Harp, or Richmond.

Mrs. Duckie's attitude to her gifted son is reverential and wondering. She is proud of his shining gifts and success, and perplexed at his possession of them; although, as she says, it comes from her side, grandfather being that musical, and her Uncle Will a terrible one to notice and make jokes.

How true it is that honour can come from our friends quite as much as from our personal attainments--often, perhaps, more. Dollie Heathcote, I feel sure, has hitherto looked upon me as a harmless old buffer, hopelessly out of date, but amiable enough, and possibly a person to be conciliated in view of my kinship with his chosen family. But when one evening at dinner I asked him casually if he knew Alf Pinto, respect for me began to grow, and when I went on to say that I had met Alf Pinto and conversed with him, he was at my feet.

"Not _the_ Alf Pinto?" he said. "Not the man who sings 'He isn't so pleased as he was'?"

"The same," I said.

He asked me feverishly how I knew him, but I am not quite so green as that. If I told Dollie that Alf Pinto was my landlady's son, all, or nearly all, the gilt would be off the gingerbread. So I made a mystery of it, and the young gentleman went off to a dance baffled but still reverent.

He did not, however, go before we had arranged an evening together at the Frivoli to hear Alf and other stars; and also not before I was able to enlighten him as to the true esoteric pronunciation of Alf's name.

"I notice," I said, "that you call him Alf Pinto. Isn't that rather a confession of weakness on your part? I thought you were in the very innermost and most knowledgable know."

Dollie looked--for him--abashed. "Why, what do you mean?" he asked.

I then explained the mystery.

"By Jove!" said Dollie, "that's clever! It's one of the dodgiest things I ever heard. 'Alf Pinto'! Ripping!"

He went away in a taxi, rolling the morsel of wit on his appreciative tongue.

The other Duckie children are Beatrice and Ern. Beatrice is twenty-two; Ern is thirteen. Beatrice is also connected with the footlights, being dresser to Miss Azure Verity, the actress who is just now drawing all London (as we say) to the Princess's to see her in the part of Selma Origen in Mr. Operin's new play.

I sometimes wonder what Mrs. Duckie would make of Browning's lines--

"Dante once prepared to paint an angel: Whom to please? You whisper 'Beatrice'"--

for to her proud maternal tongue this beautiful name is a dissyllable--Be-trice; and of Be-trice's intimacy with Miss Verity I hear much every morning, together with quotations from that lady's conversation, and tales of her successes with society.

Be-trice also, I find, has abandoned her patronymic. In the profession to which she belongs so completely as to feel entitled to refer to our leading actresses by their last names only--on the first occasion on which we met, she spoke casually of Terry, thereby meaning, to my horror and shame, the incomparable Ellen--in that profession Be-trice is not known as Miss Duckie but as Miss Lestrange.

As for Ern, he is a healthy young London boy, with all its scepticism and slang at his fingers' ends. Mrs. Duckie wants him to be a civil engineer: Mr. Duckie believes in trade, and fancies among trades none so much as that of the butcher. "An engineer," says Mrs. Duckie, "is more gentlemanly." "But," says Mr. Duckie, speaking with experience, "whatever happens, people must eat; the last thing they give up is their victuals. No doubt," he says, "engineering is useful; but look at the money it costs to learn it, and look at the competition afterwards. Whereas I can get the boy into a first-class butcher's to-morrow, and what's more, I can be of use to him myself. How could I help him in his engineering? But though I say it as shouldn't, there isn't a better judge of a steak, point or rump, or a chop, mutton or pork, than me in London."

Ern himself, I need hardly say, is opposed to both callings. At present he has but one ambition, and that is to be a shover. His only real employment so far has been parcel-packing for Mr. Bemerton on the few days each month following the publication of his catalogue. Great days downstairs, I can tell you, and sometimes twenty telegrams in a morning.

I have now described all the fauna of Bemerton's except one--the waterman--who, however, does not come indoors but lends redolence to the exterior. The waterman tends the cab rank and incidentally runs errands for the neighbourhood. London is rich in such wastrels, whose career is all behind them. They have no doubt begun reputably enough in this or that trade, drifted into the drink habit, and steadily filed through one employ after another until they have nothing left but the street corner when they are out of pence, and the public bar when pence come their way.

This man alternately drinks and shivers. His clothes are thin useless things in which he wraps himself. He stands at the corner and beats his arms; looks up each street; walks a few steps; exchanges the time of day with a cabman; and disappears into the "Goat and Compasses" again.

One of the enduring problems to the social observer is, Where do poor men find so much money for beer? When it comes to that, I suppose that the basic question of civilised life is, How on earth can the Blanks afford to live as they do? But the riches of the poor are only a little less astonishing than the riches of one's neighbours. This man seems to be dependent for his earnings on the good-nature of a few cabmen and very infrequent employment by the residents of the neighbourhood. I, for example, have given him odd tips for fetching me taximeter cabs. And yet he seems rarely to want the means to realise his one remaining and--considering how little he can have to remember with joy, I must confess--exceedingly reasonable ambition, which is to keep fuddled. When all is said against alcohol, there remains the unassailable fact that it is the poor man's best accessible anodyne. The poet's line--

"Let us be drunk and for a while forget,"

contains the whole philosophy of intoxication.

Possibly the landlord of the "God encompasseth" is lenient with him in the matter of payment, for the waterman is certainly the cause of much forgetting in others. For with all his ruined air and deplorable condition he seems to be a companionable man. He has popularity in his way. Men at work he watches with extraordinary intelligence and camaraderie: no robin by a woodshed does it better. And he seems to know what to say to them. When the road was up for new electric wires, he was the life and soul of the party. I should not be surprised if he was the best after-breakfast talker in London.

He is always cold and manifestly a sick man; but he has that wonderful gift of the London idler of never being so ill that it is necessary to stay at home. Home, do I say? It is a word which, we are too often told, the English have and the French, to their eternal loss, have not; but I should not like to see the inside of the waterman's sanctuary. It is perhaps wiser to be careful how we pity the French. I have seen his wife: for she brings him dinner in a bowl--a dispirited, broken woman. But his children? It is too horrible a thought.