The Card, page 3
It was on a Saturday morning that Mrs Codleyn called to impart to Mr Duncalf the dissatisfaction with which she had learned the news (printed on a bit of bluish paper) that her rateable value, far from being reduced, had been slightly augmented. The interview, as judged by the clerks through a lath-and-plaster wall and by means of a speaking tube, atoned by its vivacity for its lack of ceremony. When the stairs had finished creaking under the descent of Mrs Codleyn’s righteous fury, Mr Duncalf whistled sharply twice. Two whistles meant Denry. Denry picked up his shorthand note-book and obeyed the summons.
‘Take this down!’ said his master, rudely and angrily.
Just as though Denry had abetted Mrs Codleyn! Just as though Denry was not a personage of high importance in the town, the friend of countesses, and a shorthand clerk only on the surface.
‘Do you hear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘MADAM’ – hitherto it had always been ‘Dear Madam’, or ‘Dear Mrs Codleyn’ – ‘MADAM, – Of course I need hardly say that if, after our interview this morning, and your extraordinary remarks, you wish to place your interests in other hands, I shall be most happy to hand over all the papers, on payment of my costs. Yours truly … To Mrs Codleyn.’
Denry reflected: ‘Ass! Why doesn’t he let her cool down?’ Also: ‘He’s got “hands” and “hand” in the same sentence. Very ugly. Shows what a temper he’s in!’ Shorthand clerks are always like that – hypercritical. Also: ‘Well, I jolly well hope she does chuck him! Then I shan’t have those rents to collect.’ Every Monday, and often on Tuesday, too, Denry collected the rents of Mrs Codleyn’s cottages – an odious task for Denry. Mr Duncalf, though not affected by its odiousness, deducted 7½ per cent for the job from the rents.
‘That’ll do,’ said Mr Duncalf.
But as Denry was leaving the room Mr Duncalf called with formidable brusqueness –
‘Machin!’
‘Yes, sir?’
In a flash Denry knew what was coming. He felt sickly that a crisis had supervened with the suddenness of a tidal wave. And for one little second it seemed to him that to have danced with a countess while the flower of Bursley’s chivalry watched in envious wonder was not, after all, the key to the door of success throughout life.
Undoubtedly he had practised fraud in sending to himself an invitation to the ball. Undoubtedly he had practised fraud in sending invitations to his tailor and his dancing-mistress. On the day after the ball, beneath his great glory, he had trembled to meet Mr Duncalf’s eye, lest Mr Duncalf should ask him: ‘Machin, what were you doing at the Town Hall last night, behaving as if you were the Shah of Persia, the Prince of Wales, and Henry Irving?’ But Mr Duncalf had said nothing, and Mr Duncalf’s eye had said nothing, and Denry thought that the danger was past.
Now it surged up.
‘Who invited you to the Mayor’s ball?’ demanded Mr Duncalf like thunder.
Yes, there it was! And a very difficult question.
‘I did, sir,’ he blundered out. Transparent veracity. He simply could not think of a lie.
‘Why?’
‘I thought you’d perhaps forgotten to put my name down on the list of invitations, sir.’
‘Oh!’ This grimly. ‘And I suppose you thought I’d also forgotten to put down that tailor chap, Shillitoe?’
So it was all out! Shillitoe must have been chattering. Denry remembered that the classic established tailor of the town, Hatterton, whose trade Shillitoe was getting, was a particular friend of Mr Duncalf’s. He saw the whole thing.
‘Well?’ persisted Mr Duncalf, after a judicious silence from Denry.
Denry, sheltered in the castle of his silence, was not to be tempted out.
‘I suppose you rather fancy yourself dancing with your betters?’ growled Mr Duncalf, menacingly.
‘Yes,’ said Denry. ‘Do you?’
He had not meant to say it. The question slipped out of his mouth. He had recently formed the habit of retorting swiftly upon people who put queries to him: ‘Yes, are you?’ or ‘No, do you?’ The trick of speech had been enormously effective with Shillitoe, for instance, and with the Countess. He was in process of acquiring renown for it. Certainly it was effective now. Mr Duncalf’s dance with the Countess had come to an ignominious conclusion in the middle, Mr Duncalf preferring to dance on skirts rather than on the floor, and the fact was notorious.
‘You can take a week’s notice,’ said Mr Duncalf, pompously.
It was no argument. But employers are so unscrupulous in an altercation.
‘Oh, very well,’ said Denry; and to himself he said: ‘Something must turn up, now.’
He felt dizzy at being thus thrown upon the world – he who had been meditating the propriety of getting himself elected to the stylish and newly-established Sports Club at Hillport! He felt enraged, for Mr Duncalf had only been venting on Denry the annoyance induced in him by Mrs Codleyn. But it is remarkable that he was not depressed at all. No! he went about with songs and whistling, though he had no prospects except starvation or living on his mother. He traversed the streets in his grand, new manner, and his thoughts ran: ‘What on earth can I do to live up to my reputation?’ However, he possessed intact the five-pound note won from Harold Etches in the matter of the dance.
II
Every life is a series of coincidences. Nothing happens that is not rooted in coincidence. All great changes find their cause in coincidence. Therefore I shall not mince the fact that the next change in Denry’s career was due to an enormous and complicated coincidence. On the following morning both Mrs Codleyn and Denry were late for service at St Luke’s Church – Mrs Codleyn by accident and obesity, Denry by design. Denry was later than Mrs Codleyn, whom he discovered waiting in the porch. That Mrs Codleyn was waiting is an essential part of the coincidence. Now Mrs Codleyn would not have been waiting, if her pew had not been right at the front of the church, near the choir. Nor would she have been waiting if she had been a thin woman and not given to breathing loudly after a hurried walk. She waited partly to get her breath, and partly so that she might take advantage of a hymn or a psalm to gain her seat without attracting attention. If she had not been late, if she had not been stout, if she had not had a seat under the pulpit, if she had not had an objection to making herself conspicuous, she would have been already in the church and Denry would not have had a private colloquy with her.
‘Well, you’re nice people, I must say!’ she observed, as he raised his hat.
She meant Duncalf and all Duncalf’s myrmidons. She was still full of her grievance. The letter which she had received that morning had startled her. And even the shadow of the sacred edifice did not prevent her from referring to an affair that was more suited to Monday than to Sunday morning. A little more, and she would have snorted.
‘Nothing to do with me, you know!’ Denry defended himself.
‘Oh!’ she said, ‘you’re all alike, and I’ll tell you this, Mr Machin, I’d take him at his word if it wasn’t that I don’t know who else I could trust to collect my rents. I’ve heard such tales about rent-collectors … I reckon I shall have to make my peace with him.’
‘Why,’ said Denry, ‘I’ll keep on collecting your rents for you if you like.’
‘You?’
‘I’ve given him notice to leave,’ said Denry. ‘The fact is, Mr Duncalf and I don’t hit it off together.’
Another procrastinator arrived in the porch, and, by a singular simultaneous impulse, Mrs Codleyn and Denry fell into the silence of the overheard and wandered forth together among the graves.
There, among the graves, she eyed him. He was a clerk at eighteen shillings a week, and he looked it. His mother was a sempstress, and he looked it. The idea of neat but shabby Denry and the mighty Duncalf not hitting it off together seemed excessively comic. If only Denry could have worn his dress-suit at church! It vexed him exceedingly that he had only worn that expensive dress-suit once, and saw no faintest hope of ever being able to wear it again.
‘And what’s more,’ Denry pursued, ‘I’ll collect ’em for five per cent instead of seven-and-a-half. Give me a free hand and see if I don’t get better results than he did. And I’ll settle accounts every month, or week if you like, instead of once a quarter, like he does.’
The bright and beautiful idea had smitten Denry like some heavenly arrow. It went through him and pierced Mrs Codleyn with equal success. It was an idea that appealed to the reason, to the pocket, and to the instinct of revenge. Having revengefully settled the hash of Mr Duncalf, they went into church.
No need to continue this part of the narrative. Even the text of the rector’s sermon has no bearing on the issue.
In a week there was a painted board affixed to the door of Denry’s mother:
E. H. MACHIN
Rent Collector and Estate Agent
There was also an advertisement in the Signal, announcing that Denry managed estates large or small.
III
The next crucial event in Denry’s career happened one Monday morning, in a cottage that was very much smaller even than his mother’s. This cottage, part of Mrs Codleyn’s multitudinous property, stood by itself in Chapel Alley, behind the Wesleyan chapel; the majority of the tenements were in Carpenter’s Square, near to. The neighbourhood was not distinguished for its social splendour, but existence in it was picturesque, varied, exciting, full of accidents, as existence is apt to be in residences that cost their occupiers an average of three shillings a week. Some persons referred to the quarter as a slum, and ironically insisted on its adjacency to the Wesleyan chapel, as though that was the Wesleyan chapel’s fault. Such people did not understand life and the joy thereof.
The solitary cottage had a front yard, about as large as a blanket, surrounded by an insecure brick wall and paved with mud. You went up two steps, pushed at a door, and instantly found yourself in the principal reception-room, which no earthly blanket could possibly have covered. Behind this chamber could be seen obscurely an apartment so tiny that an auctioneer would have been justified in terming it ‘bijou’, furnished simply but practically with a slopstone; also the beginnings of a stairway. The furniture of the reception-room comprised two chairs and a table, one or two saucepans, and some antique crockery. What lay at the upper end of the stairway no living person knew, save the old woman who slept there. The old woman sat at the fireplace, ‘all bunched up’, as they say in the Five Towns. The only fire in the room, however, was in the short clay pipe which she smoked; Mrs Hullins was one of the last old women in Bursley to smoke a cutty; and even then the pipe was considered coarse, and cigarettes were coming into fashion – though not in Chapel Alley. Mrs Hullins smoked her pipe, and thought about nothing in particular. Occasionally some vision of the past floated through her drowsy brain. She had lived in that residence for over forty years. She had brought up eleven children and two husbands there. She had coddled thirty-five grandchildren there, and given instruction to some half-dozen daughters-in-law. She had known midnights when she could scarcely move in that residence without disturbing somebody asleep. Now she was alone in it. She never left it, except to fetch water from the pump in the square. She had seen a lot of life, and she was tired.
Denry came unceremoniously in, smiling gaily and benevolently, with his bright, optimistic face under his fair brown hair. He had large and good teeth. He was getting – not stout, but plump.
‘Well, mother!’ he greeted Mrs Hullins, and sat down on the other chair.
A young fellow obviously at peace with the world, a young fellow content with himself for the moment. No longer a clerk; one of the employed; saying ‘sir’ to persons with no more fingers and toes than he had himself; bound by servile agreement to be in a fixed place at fixed hours! An independent unit, master of his own time and his own movements! In brief, a man! The truth was that he earned now in two days a week slightly more than Mr Duncalf paid him for the labour of five and a half days. His income, as collector of rents and manager of estates large or small, totalled about a pound a week. But, he walked forth in the town, smiled, joked, spoke vaguely, and said, ‘Do you?’ to such a tune that his income might have been guessed to be anything from ten pounds a week to ten thousand a year. And he had four days a week in which to excogitate new methods of creating a fortune.
‘I’ve nowt for ye,’ said the old woman, not moving.
‘Come, come, now! That won’t do,’ said Denry. ‘Have a pinch of my tobacco.’
She accepted a pinch of his tobacco, and refilled her pipe, and he gave her a match.
‘I’m not going out of this house without half-a-crown at any rate!’ said Denry, blithely.
And he rolled himself a cigarette, possibly to keep warm. It was very chilly in the stuffy residence, but the old woman never shivered. She was one of those old women who seem to wear all the skirts of all their lives, one over the other.
‘Ye’re here for th’ better part o’ some time, then,’ observed Mrs Hullins, looking facts in the face. ‘I’ve told you about my son Jack. He’s been playing [out of work] six weeks. He starts today, and he’ll gi’ me summat Saturday.’
‘That won’t do,’ said Denry, curtly and kindly.
He then, with his bluff benevolence, explained to Mother Hullins that Mrs Codleyn would stand no further increase of arrears from anybody, that she could not afford to stand any further increase of arrears, that her tenants were ruining her, and that he himself, with all his cheery good-will for the rent-paying classes, would be involved in her fall.
‘Six-and-forty years have I been i’ this ’ere house!’ said Mrs Hullins.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Denry. ‘And look at what you owe, mother!’
It was with immense good-humoured kindliness that he invited her attention to what she owed. She tacitly declined to look at it.
‘Your children ought to keep you,’ said Denry, upon her silence.
‘Them as is dead, can’t,’ said Mrs Hullins, ‘and them as is alive has their own to keep, except Jack.’
‘Well, then, it’s bailiffs,’ said Denry, but still cheerfully.
‘Nay, nay! Ye’ll none turn me out.’
Denry threw up his hands, as if to exclaim: ‘I’ve done all I can, and I’ve given you a pinch of tobacco. Besides, you oughtn’t to be here alone. You ought to be with one of your children.’
There was more conversation, which ended in Denry’s repeating, with sympathetic resignation:
‘No, you’ll have to get out. It’s bailiffs.’
Immediately afterwards he left the residence with a bright filial smile. And then, in two minutes, he popped his cheerful head in at the door again.
‘Look here, mother,’ he said, ‘I’ll lend you half-a-crown if you like.’
Charity beamed on his face, and genuinely warmed his heart.
‘But you must pay me something for the accommodation,’ he added. ‘I can’t do it for nothing. You must pay me back next week and give me threepence. That’s fair. I couldn’t bear to see you turned out of your house. Now get your rent-book.’
And he marked half-a-crown as paid in her greasy, dirty rent-book, and the same in his large book.
‘Eh, you’re a queer ’un, Mester Machin!’ murmured the old woman as he left. He never knew precisely what she meant. Fifteen – twenty – years later in his career her intonation of that phrase would recur to him and puzzle him.
On the following Monday everybody in Chapel Alley and Carpenter’s Square seemed to know that the inconvenience of bailiffs and eviction could be avoided by arrangement with Denry the philanthropist. He did quite a business. And having regard to the fantastic nature of the security, he could not well charge less than threepence a week for half-a-crown. That was about 40 per cent a month and 500 per cent per annum. The security was merely fantastic, but nevertheless he had his remedy against evil-doers. He would take what they paid him for rent and refuse to mark it as rent, appropriating it to his loans, so that the fear of bailiffs was upon them again. Thus, as the good genius of Chapel Alley and Carpenter’s Square, saving the distressed from the rigours of the open street, rescuing the needy from their tightest corners, keeping many a home together when but for him it would have fallen to pieces – always smiling, jolly, sympathetic, and picturesque – Denry at length employed the five-pound note won from Harold Etches. A five-pound note – especially a new and crisp one, as this was – is a miraculous fragment of matter, wonderful in the pleasure which the sight of it gives, even to millionaires; but perhaps no five-pound note was ever so miraculous as Denry’s. Ten per cent per week, compound interest, mounts up; it ascends, and it lifts. Denry never talked precisely. But the town soon began to comprehend that he was a rising man, a man to watch. The town admitted that, so far, he had lived up to his reputation as a dancer with countesses. The town felt that there was something indefinable about Denry.
Denry himself felt this. He did not consider himself clever or brilliant. But he considered himself peculiarly gifted. He considered himself different from other men. His thoughts would run:
‘Anybody but me would have knuckled down to Duncalf and remained a shorthand clerk for ever.’
