Arnold Bennett: Buried Alive, The Old Wives' Tale & The Card (3 Books in One Edition). Bennett Arnold
out of monstrous teacups in their anxiety to be consumed; spouting bottles of ale whose froth alone would have floated the mail steamers pictured on an adjoining sheet; and forty different decoctions for imparting strength. Then after a few score yards of invitation to debauch there came, with characteristic admirable English common sense, a cure for indigestion, so large that it would have given ease to a mastodon who had by inadvertence swallowed an elephant. And then there were the calls to pleasure. Astonishing, the quantity of palaces that offered you exactly the same entertainment twice over on the same night! Astonishing, the reliance on number in this matter of amusement! Authenticated statements that a certain performer had done a certain thing in a certain way a thousand and one times without interruption were stuck all over the Upper Richmond Road, apparently in the sure hope that you would rush to see the thousand and second performance. These performances were invariably styled original and novel. All the remainder of free wall space was occupied by philanthropists who were ready to give away cigarettes at the nominal price of a penny a packet.
Priam Farll never tired of the phantasmagoria of Upper Richmond Road. The interminable, intermittent vision of food dead and alive, and of performers performing the same performance from everlasting to everlasting, and of millions and millions of cigarettes ascending from the mouths of handsome young men in incense to heaven--this rare vision, of which in all his wanderings he had never seen the like, had the singular effect of lulling his soul into a profound content. Not once did he arrive at the end of the vision. No! when he reached Barnes Station he could see the vision still stretching on and on; but, filled to the brim, he would get into an omnibus and return. The omnibus awoke him to other issues: the omnibus was an antidote. In the omnibus cleanliness was nigh to godliness. On one pane a soap was extolled, and on another the exordium, "For this is a true saying and worthy of all acceptation," was followed by the statement of a religious dogma; while on another pane was an urgent appeal not to do in the omnibus what you would not do in a drawing-room. Yes, Priam Farll had seen the world, but he had never seen a city so incredibly strange, so packed with curious and rare psychological interest as London. And he regretted that he had not discovered London earlier in his life-long search after romance.
At the corner of the High Street he left the omnibus and stopped a moment to chat with his tobacconist. His tobacconist was a stout man in a white apron, who stood for ever behind a counter and sold tobacco to the most respected residents of Putney. All his ideas were connected either with tobacco or with Putney. A murder in the Strand to that tobacconist was less than the breakdown of a motor bus opposite Putney Station; and a change of government less than a change of programme at the Putney Empire. A rather pessimistic tobacconist, not inclined to believe in a First Cause, until one day a drunken man smashed Salmon and Gluckstein's window down the High Street, whereupon his opinion of Providence went up for several days! Priam enjoyed talking to him, though the tobacconist was utterly impervious to ideas and never gave out ideas. This morning the tobacconist was at his door. At the other corner was the sturdy old woman whom Priam had observed from his window. She sold flowers.
"Fine old woman, that!" said Priam heartily, after he and the tobacconist had agreed upon the fact that it was a glorious morning.
"She used to be at the opposite corner by the station until last May but one, when the police shifted her," said the tobacconist.
"Why did the police shift her?" asked Priam.
"I don't know as I can tell you," said the tobacconist. "But I remember her this twelve year."
"I only noticed her this morning," said Priam. "I saw her from my bedroom window, coming down the Werter Road. I said to myself, 'She's the finest old woman I ever saw in my life!'"
"Did you now!" murmured the tobacconist. "She's rare and dirty."
"I like her to be dirty," said Priam stoutly. "She ought to be dirty. She wouldn't be the same if she were clean."
"I don't hold with dirt," said the tobacconist calmly. "She'd be better if she had a bath of a Saturday night like other folks."
"Well," said Priam, "I want an ounce of the usual."
"Thank you, sir," said the tobacconist, putting down three-halfpence change out of sixpence as Priam thanked him for the packet.
Nothing whatever in such a dialogue! Yet Priam left the shop with a distinct feeling that life was good. And he plunged into High Street, lost himself in crowds of perambulators and nice womanly women who were bustling honestly about in search of food or raiment. Many of them carried little red books full of long lists of things which they and their admirers and the offspring of mutual affection had eaten or would shortly eat. In the High Street all was luxury: not a necessary in the street. Even the bakers' shops were a mass of sultana and Berlin pancakes. Illuminated calendars, gramophones, corsets, picture postcards, Manilla cigars, bridge-scorers, chocolate, exotic fruit, and commodious mansions--these seemed to be the principal objects offered for sale in High Street. Priam bought a sixpenny edition of Herbert Spencer's Essays for four-pence-halfpenny, and passed on to Putney Bridge, whose noble arches divided a first storey of vans and omnibuses from a ground-floor of barges and racing eights. And he gazed at the broad river and its hanging gardens, and dreamed; and was wakened by the roar of an electric train shooting across the stream on a red causeway a few yards below him. And, miles off, he could descry the twin towers of the Crystal Palace, more marvellous than mosques!
"Astounding!" he murmured joyously. He had not a care in the world; and Putney was all that Alice had painted it. In due time, when bells had pealed to right and to left of him, he went home to her.
Collapse of the Putney System
Now, just at the end of lunch, over the last stage of which they usually sat a long time, Alice got up quickly, in the midst of her Stilton, and, going to the mantelpiece, took a letter therefrom.
"I wish you'd look at that, Henry," she said, handing him the letter. "It came this morning, but of course I can't be bothered with that sort of thing in the morning. So I put it aside."
He accepted the letter, and unfolded it with the professional all-knowing air which even the biggest male fool will quite successfully put on in the presence of a woman if consulted about business. When he had unfolded the thing--it was typed on stiff, expensive, quarto paper--he read it. In the lives of beings like Priam Farll and Alice a letter such as that letter is a terrible event, unique, earth-arresting; simple recipients are apt, on receiving it, to imagine that the Christian era has come to an end. But tens of thousands of similar letters are sent out from the City every day, and the City thinks nothing of them.
The letter was about Cohoon's Brewery Company, Limited, and it was signed by a firm of solicitors. It referred to the verbatim report, which it said would be found in the financial papers, of the annual meeting of the company held at the Cannon Street Hotel on the previous day, and to the exceedingly unsatisfactory nature of the Chairman's statement. It regretted the absence of Mrs. Alice Challice (her change of condition had not yet reached the heart of Cohoon's) from the meeting, and asked her whether she would be prepared to support the action of a committee which had been formed to eject the existing board and which had already a following of 385,000 votes. It finished by asserting that unless the committee was immediately lifted to absolute power the company would be quite ruined.
Priam re-read the letter aloud.
"What does it all mean?" asked Alice quietly.
"Well," said he, "that's what it means."
"Does it mean--?" she began.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "I forgot. I saw something on a placard this morning about Cohoon's, and I thought it might interest you, so I bought it." So saying, he drew from his pocket the Financial Times, which he had entirely forgotten. There it was: a column and a quarter of the Chairman's speech, and nearly two columns of stormy scenes. The Chairman was the Marquis of Drumgaldy, but his rank had apparently not shielded him from the violence of expletives such as "Liar!" "Humbug!" and even "Rogue!" The Marquis had merely stated, with every formula of apology, that, owing to the extraordinary depreciation in licensed property, the directors had not felt justified in declaring any