The Return of Don Quixote Read online

  And, sure enough, no sooner had he stepped outside the old Gothic gateway of Seawood than he came face to face with a prodigy. He might almost have said a monster. A figure was entering the house as he was leaving it; a figure at once fearfully unfamiliar. He struggled with some confusion of identity; as in a nightmare. Then he sank into a stupefied certainty; for the figure was that of Mr. John Braintree; and he had shaved off his beard.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE MISADVENTURES OF MONKEY

  Murrel stood staring in the porch at the figure which appeared dark against the outer landscape; and all the fanciful part of him, which was largely subconscious, was stirred by half serious fancies. No black cat or white crow or piebald horse or any such proverbial prodigy could have been so inscrutable an omen at the beginning of his journey as this strange appearance of the Shaven Syndicalist. Meanwhile Braintree stared back at him with a hardihood almost amounting to hostility, despite their mutual affection; he could no longer thrust out his beard, but he thrust out his chin so as to make it seem equally big and aggressive.

  But Murrel only said genially, “You are coming to help us, I hope.” He was a tactful person and he did not say, “You are coming to help us, after all.” But he understood in a flash all that had happened; he understood Olive Ashley’s country walks and her abstraction and the way in which her curious social experiment had come to a crisis. Poor Braintree had been caught on the rebound, in the reaction after his depressing experiment as a drunken reveller. He might have easily gone on bullying her along with all the other nobs, so long as he had the sensation of marching into their palace with the populace behind him. But since the night when Murrel himself had sown the seed of doubt about his friend’s democratic status, the latter had become merely an intensely sensitive and rather introspective individual; and one on whom graciousness and a delicate sympathy were certainly not altogether thrown away. Murrel understood all about it, except perhaps the end of it, which remained rather cloudy; but he did not allow the faintest trace of intelligence to appear in his tone of voice.

  “Yes,” replied Braintree stolidly, “Miss Ashley told me somebody had to come in and help. I wonder you don’t do it yourself.”

  “Not much,” replied Murrel. “I said at the beginning that if they would insult me by calling me a stage-manager, at least I wasn’t wicked enough to be an actor-manager. Since then Julian Archer has taken over all the managing there is lying about. Besides, Miss Ashley has another sort of commission in my case.”

  “Indeed?” inquired Braintree. “Now I come to look at you, you look as if you were going out to seek your fortunes in the goldfields or somewhere.” And he eyed with some wonder the equipment of his friend, who carried a knapsack, a resolute looking walking-stick and a leather belt apparently supporting a sheath-knife.

  “Yes,” said Murrel, “I am armed to the teeth. I am going on active service–going to the Front.” Then after a pause he added, “The truth is I’m going shopping.”

  “Oh,” said the wondering Braintree.

  “Say good-bye to my friends, old fellow,” said Murrel with some emotion. “If I fall in the first charge at the Bargain Counter, say that my last thought was fixed firmly on Julian Archer. Put up a little stone on the spot where I fell, and when the Spring Sales come back with all their birds and flowers, remember me. Farewell. I wish you luck.”

  And waving his resolute walking-stick in the air with gestures of benediction, he betook himself briskly along the path through the park, leaving the dark figure in the porch looking rather doubtfully after him.

  The birds of spring, which he had just invoked so pathetically, were indeed singing in the bright plantation of little trees through which he went; the light green tufts of leafage had themselves something of the look of sprouting feathers. It was one of those moments in the year when the world seems to be growing wings. The trees seemed to stand on tiptoe as if ready to soar into the air, in the wake of the great pink and white cloud that went before him overhead like a cherubic herald in the sky. Something childish in his memories awoke; and he could almost have fancied that he was a fairy prince and his clumsy walking-stick was a sword. Then he remembered that his enterprise was not to take him into forests and valleys but into the labyrinth of commonplace and cockney towns; and his plain and pleasant and shrewd face was wrinkled with a laugh of irony.

  By various stages he made his way first to the big industrial town in which he had gone on his celebrated round of revelry with John Braintree. But now he was in no mood of nocturnal festivity; but in an almost sternly statistical and commercial attitude of the cold white light of morning. “Business is business,” he said severely. “Now I am a business man I must look at things in a hard practical way. I believe all business men say to themselves sharply before breakfast, ‘Business is business.’ I suppose it’s all that can be said for it. Seems a bit tautological.”

  He approached first the long line of Babylonian buildings that bore the title of “The Imperial Stores” in gold letters rather larger than the windows. He approached it deliberately; but it would have been rather difficult to approach anything else, for it occupied the whole of one side of the High Street and some part of the other. There were crowds of people inside trying to get out and crowds of people outside trying to get in, reinforced by more crowds of people not trying to get in, but standing and staring in at the windows without the least ambition to get anywhere.

  At intervals in the crawling crush he came on big bland men who waved him on with beautifully curved motions of the hand; so that he felt a boiling impulse to hit these highly courteous bounders a furious blow on the head with his heavy walking-stick; but he felt that such a prelude to adventure might bring matters to a premature end. With raging restraint he repeated the name of the department he desired to each of these polished persons; and then the polished one also repeated the name of the department and waved him onwards; and he passed on, grinding his teeth. It seemed to be generally believed that somewhere or other in these endless gilded galleries and subterranean halls there was a department devoted to Artists’ Materials; but there was no indication of how far away it was or how long it would take, at the present rate of progress, to get there. Every now and then they came on the huge shaft or well of a lift; and the congestion was slightly relieved by some people being swallowed up by the earth and others vanishing into the ceiling. Eventually he himself found he was one of those fated, like Aeneas, to descend into the lower world. Here a new and equally interminable pilgrimage began, with the added exhilaration of knowing that it was sunken far below the street, like an interminable coal-cellar.

  “How much more convenient it is,” he said to himself cheerfully, “to go to one shop for everything, instead of having to walk nearly seventy yards in the open air from one shop to another!”

  The gentleman called Monkey had not come to the encounter (or to the counter) altogether unequipped with instruments more appropriate to the occasion than a cudgel and a large sheath-knife. Indeed, the whole thing was not so much out of his way as his demeanour might indicate. He had gone round before now trying to match ribbons or obtain for somebody an exact shade in neckties. He was one of those people who are always being trusted by other people in small and practical matters; and it was not the first errand he had run for Miss Olive Ashley. He was the sort of man who is discovered taking care of a dog, which is not his dog; in whose rooms are to be found trunks and suit-cases which Bill or Charlie will pick up on the way from Mesopotamia to New York; who is often left to mind the baggage and might quite conceivably be left to mind the baby. Yet it is not enough to say that he did not lose his dignity (which, such as it was, was very deep down in him indeed and very indestructible), but, what is perhaps more interesting, he did not lose his liberty. He did not lose his lounging air of doing the thing because he chose; possibly (the more subtle have suspected) because that was really why he did it. He had the knack of turning any of these things int
o a sort of absurd adventure; just as he had already turned Miss Ashley’s earnest little errand into an absurd adventure. This attitude of the all-round assistant sat easily on him because it suited him; something unassuming in his ugly and pleasant face, in his unattached sociability and very variegated friend-ships, made it come quite natural to anybody to ask him a favour. He gravely took out of his pocket-book a piece of old, stiff paper, rather like parchment and embrowned with age or dust, on which was traced in a faint but finely drawn outline the plumage of one part of the wing of a bird, probably intended as a study for the wings of an angel. For a few of the plumes were picked out in strokes like flames of a rather curious flaming red, which seemed still to glow like something unquenchable even upon that faded design and dusty page.

  Nobody could really know how much Murrel was trusted in such matters, who did not know what were Olive Ashley’s feelings about that old scrap of paper scratched with that unfinished sketch. For it had been made long ago when she was a child by her father; who was a remarkable man in more ways than anybody ever knew, but especially remarkable as a father. To him was due the fact that all her first thoughts about things had been coloured. All those things that for so many people are called culture and come at the end of education had been there for her before the beginning. Certain pointed shapes, certain shining colours, were things that existed first and set a standard for all this fallen world and it was that which she was clumsily trying to express when she set her thoughts against all the notions of progress and reform. Her nearest and dearest friend would have been amazed to know that she caught her breath at the mere memory of certain wavy bars of silver or escalloped edges of peacock green, as others do at the reminder of a lost love.

  Murrel, as he took this precious fragment from his pocket-book, took with it a newer and shinier piece of paper, on which a note was written in the words: “Hendry’s Old Illumination Colours; shop in Haymarket fifteen years ago. Not Hendry and Watson. Used to be sold in small round glass pots. J. A. thinks more likely in country town than London now.”

  Armed with these weapons of attack, he was borne up against the counter stacked with artists’ materials, he himself being wedged between a large mild buffer and an eager and even very ferocious lady. The old buffer was very slow and the lady was very rapid, and between them the young woman attempting to sell at the counter seemed to be somewhat distraught. She looked wildly over her shoulder at one person while her hands shot out in all directions to deal with others; and the remarks shot sideways out of her mouth, which were of an irritated sort, seemed to be addressed to somebody quite different; apparently to somebody behind.

  “Never the time and the place and the loved one all together,” murmured Murrel with an air of resignation. “It does not seem perhaps the perfect moment, the perfect combination of conditions, in which to open one’s heart about Olive’s early childhood and her fireside dreams about the flaming cherubim, or even to go very deep into the influence of her father on her growing mind. And I don’t know how else one is exactly to convey how important this is, or why any of us should take any particular trouble about it. It all comes of having an open mind and sympathising with so many different sorts of people. When I talk to Olive I know that the right and wrong colour are just as real to her as the right and wrong of anything else; and a dull shade in the red is like a shadow on honour or somebody not quite telling the truth. But when I look at this girl, I feel she has every reason to congratulate herself, when she says her evening prayers, if she hasn’t sold six easels instead of five sketch books, or thrown all the Indian ink over the people who asked for turpentine.”

  He resolved to reduce his original explanation to the simplest possible terms to start with and expand it afterwards, if he survived. Gripping his piece of paper firmly in his hand, he confronted the shop girl with the eye of a lion-tamer, and said: “Have you got Hendry’s Old Illumination Colours?”

  The young woman gazed at him for a few seconds; and there was on her face exactly the same expression as if he had spoken to her in Russian or Chinese. She forgot for a moment all that mechanical and merciless civility which accompanied the rapid and recognised exchanges. She did not beg his pardon or go through any such form. She simply said, “Eh?” and her voice rose sharply with that deep, incurable, querulous complaint and protest which is the very soul of the accent that we call Cockney.

  The way of the conscientious modern novelist is hard; or rather it is much worse, it is soft. It is like plodding heavily through loose and soft sand, when he himself would be only too delighted to leap from crag to crag or from crisis to crisis. When he would fain take the wings of a dove and fly away and be at rest in some reposeful murder, shipwreck, revolution or universal conflagration, he is condemned for a time to toil along the dusty road which is the way such things happen; and must pass through a purgatory of law and order before entering his paradise of blood and ruin. Realism is dull; that is what is meant by saying that realism alone tells the truth about our intense and intelligent civilisation. Thus, for instance, nothing but a mass of most monotonous detail could convey to the reader any impression of the real conversation between Mr. Douglas Murrel and the young woman selling him, or not selling him, paints. To be true to the psychological effect of that cumulative conversation it would be necessary, to start with, to print Mr. Murrel’s question ten times over in exactly the same words, till the page looked like a pattern. Still less can any brief and picturesque selection give any notion of the phases through which the wondering face of the saleswoman passed, or the variation in her artless comments. How should rapid narrative describe how big business dealt with the problem? How she said they had got illumination colours and produced water colours in a shilling box. How she then said they had not got illumination colours and implied that there were no such things in the world; that they were a fevered dream of the customer’s fancy. How she pressed pastels upon him, assuring him that they were just the same. How she said, in a disinterested manner, that certain brands of green and purple ink were being sold very much just now. How she asked abruptly if it was for children, and made a faint effort to pass him on to the Toy Department. How she finally relapsed into an acid agnosticism, even assuming a certain dignity, which had the curious effect of appearing to give her a cold in her head, and causing her to answer all further remarks by saying: “Dote know, I’be sure.”

  All this would have to occupy as much space as it did time, before the effect on the customer could be found excusable, especially to himself. A wild protest against the preposterousness of things in general surged up inside him; a sort of melodrama that found its energy in mockery. He leaned over the counter in a lowering and almost bullying fashion, and said: “Where is Hendry? What have you done with Hendry, that household word? Why all these dark evasions when Hendry is mentioned; this sinister and significant silence on this one subject; this still more sinister and significant changing of the subject? Why do you tear the conversation away towards pastels? Why do you erect a screen or barricade of cheap chalks and tin paint-boxes? Why do you use red ink as a red herring? What happened to Hendry? Where have you hidden him?”

  He was about to add, in a low and hissing voice, “or all that remains of him,” when he had a revulsion, and his better feelings returned with a rush. A sudden sense of the pathos of this bewildered automaton overwhelmed his good-natured spirit with shame; he stopped in the middle of a sentence, hesitated, and then adopted another method for pursuing his purpose. Putting his hand hastily into his pocket, he pulled out some envelopes and a card-case, and presenting his name, asked with courtesy, and almost humility, if he could see the manager of the department. He gave the girl his card, and the next moment regretted that also.

  There was one weak side of the many-sided Mr. Murrel on which he could be abashed and thrown off his balance; perhaps it was the only kind of attack he really feared. It was anything like a gross and obvious appeal to the accident of privilege that belonged to his social pos
ition. It would be cant to say that he was always unconscious of his rank. Somewhere deep inside him, perhaps, he was even too conscious of it. But it was deeply embedded in him that the only way to defend it was to ignore it. Moreover, there was a certain complexity and conflict; and some pride in the accident of being born with a few others “in the know” wrestled with the real and deep desire of all masculine men for equality. The one thing that embarrassed him was any such reminder, and he remembered too late that his card and address carried certain indications of such things; a club and a formal title. Worst of all, it was working; it was obviously working like a charm. The girl referred back to the mysterious being behind her, to whom so many of her peevish excuses were addressed; that being in turn studied the card, probably with an eye wiser in the wickedness of this world; and after a good deal more fuss, which only a realistic novelist would bother to describe, Douglas Murrel did really find himself bowed into the private apartment of one evidently in authority.

  “Wonderful place you have here,” he said cheerfully. “All done by organisation, I suppose. I expect you could pretty well get into touch with all the trade conditions in the world if you put your machinery to work.”