The Wind and the Rain: A Book of Confessions

THE WIND AND THE RAIN

CHAPTER I

CAUSEWAY

THE road is long, says the Eastern sage, but it has many corners; and my London road has corners at Limehouse Causeway; at a court in the heart of Bermondsey; at Caledonian Road; at Greenwich; at Paddington Station; at The Barge Aground; at Lyons’ tea-shop in Holborn; at Belgravia; at Gracechurch Street; at Brick Lane; and the Borough High Street; each corner a symbol of those other symbols of life which we call facts.

At the first corner I see a little store in that street where China has settled on the coast of London and brought grace and bitterness to the midnights of court and alley. Over the doorway of this store is a gas-lamp painted with the chop of Quong Lee. It is a side-street shop, no different in structure from the side-street shops of any working-class district; small and low, with many panes to its window; but its side-panels are fantastically gay with Chinese script, and its window is crammed with the merchandise of legend. Blue jars of ginger. Coloured canisters of tea. Tins of fruit and fish and syrup, lifted above the tinned goods of other shops by their ribbons of ideographs. Crooked weapons and statuettes of coral and jade. Dishes of dried fins, of lychees, longans, seaweed and water-lily flour. Teapots built into cradles of cushion and wicker. Banners and masks and punk-sticks.

Before that window a child stands by the half-hour, poring upon the ideographs, then (as now) fuller for him of hidden beauty than any painted picture. About him is a narrow street, and through its mist move the calm faces of Canton and Malaya. There are open doors showing long, dark passages, and at the end of them the glow of a lamp, half-seen figures the smell of sweet scent and dirt, the faint music of guitar and drum. Above his head hangs the lantern of Quong Lee, and beyond the window sits Quong Lee himself, gazing out as the boy gazes in.

Quong Lee wears steel spectacles and the hair at his temples is grey. He wears a blue linen suit, loose sleeves, a skull-cap of black silk, and a long queue. (The Republic is not yet heard of.) He has the husky voice of those who have lived long in the sunshine. His teeth are pink from long chewing of betel-nut, and his skin has the appearance of having been fine-combed. All day and all the evening he sits in the corner-seat of his counter, gazing through the window with unwinking eyes, as though carven. He seems to be a part of the immutable. His temper is fixed, aloof from the disturbance of delight or distress. He seems as set as his ginger-jars, as permanent and tranquil as the expressionless face of his seven-stomached Lord of Right Living.

But it was not so. Fluent as his road had been, it had a sharp corner. His shop is there; his lantern is there; maybe his spirit is there; but the English law had not the child’s feeling for the perdurable, and all that the child now has of him in material shape is an old silk cap, tasselled with devil-chasers.

Many years later I was sitting in the Ivy Restaurant with a young composer who a month or so earlier had arrived. He was at the top-side of his hour. He sat before me, under the stare of the other tables, tingling with nervous force, ruffling his dark curls, flashing with mignon gesture, and talking sardonically about himself. People came to us at intervals without apology or introduction. An actor of the higher drama, dark and reticent, offered him a white hand. A queen of drawing-room comedy bowed. A bearded dramatic critic gave him a glance that, coming from him, was a benediction. A novelist with owlish eyes shook hands and inspected him without speaking. A London Gossiper, the Captain Gronow of our day, stood over him, slim and saturnine, dropping languid epigrams. His agent came across, and we found a chair for him, and at last lunch was ordered. People stared, as though anxious to see (at least) what the man was eating.

At this point I suffered the feeling that I have suffered at every corner, where in the moment of turning, one stands still and sees oneself and the occasion set apart, as a picture or statuary, exhibited under glass. It seemed fabulous that I should be sitting in that place, careless of the clock, careless of the bill, undismayed by the surroundings, and in the company of those, who, ten years ago, to my eyes walked on clouds. Me—in the Ivy. Was it really me sitting there? Me—the Hardcress kid, brought up to be humble, and to order myself lowly and reverently towards the Nobility and Gentry, and to remember that I had no rights except what charity conceded to me; a lesson so stamped into me that it has become a part of my character. A queer thing, this Me. I was the Causeway. I was the one room in Carfax Street. I was the Big House at Greenwich. I was the Orphanage. I was the Dark House in Caledonian Road. I was the City Office. I was London Bridge. I was the Old Kent Road Lodging-house. I was. . . .

At that moment a mousse of chicken was served, and as I looked up from my plate I caught my young friend’s eye and, speaking without thinking, I said: Pearce and Plenty, Goswell Road. Eh? His eye flickered. The faint grin of his that plays shield to his quivering spirit flashed across his face, and he asked:

How do you know?

I said, Your face. You’ve got the marks of it. One never loses them.

He said, Funny! I used to go to that one. And it’s just what I was thinking when you spoke. Only I’d never have said it.

As the lunch went on we telegraphed each other.

Lockhart’s, Charing Cross, says he to the asparagus.

Good Pull Up, Newington Causeway, I said to the Pêche Melba.

And when M. Abel himself poured the liqueurs, ‘The Old Foresters.’ Tuppence a basin.

I knew that his road had many corners, and I could see that he was fumbling after them. He came out at last with the phrase with which even serious philosophers must begin and end—Life’s a queer thing, and stopped. Then went on, and for ten minutes the conversation was a string of sententious burbling. All accidents. Here we are, sitting here, a few years after Pearce and Plenty. What extraordinary accident brought us here?

Lord knows. What accident made you a composer?

Couldn’t say. One of a dozen moments. Being miserable, for one thing. Wanting to tell people what I felt about things. Meeting a man at Kennington Oval. All of ’em were corners, but where I turned off I don’t know. He stopped and drank coffee. We’re all decorated with accidents. Assemblies of parts, like a South Sea nigger, with this man’s hat, t’other fellow’s cuffs, and somebody else’s umbrella.

But did you want to be a composer?

Never entered my head in those days. Music was always part of me but I wanted to be—oh, all sorts of things—expensive things. But composer. . . . First of all, I reckon I wanted two pairs of boots instead of one pair that let water. I wanted books. And theatres and concerts. And all the time I was really working—at silly, useless work—I never got near those things. No money, no hope, stupid people all round us, and always—just out of reach—music and books and the people who did things. Now I’m doing work that is sheer enjoyment, they’ll give me everything I want. And all an accident. Not the thing I foreshadowed for myself. Never is, is it? What made you a writer?

I think I can answer that. It goes back to a moment when I was ten years old, looking in a shop-window. I began writing at sixteen. Not because I wanted to write, or thought I could write, or for the joy of writing, but with one purpose. I’ve been at it ever since. Just trying to express one moment in a London side-street. I’ve never done it yet. But one goes on and does other things by accident. Eh?

I know. I had something like that once. One of those things that stick with you, and somehow get into your work.

I’d like to hear it.

"Why, it was. . . . Oh. . . . But you know. The moment when everything comes close to you and you understand everything. When you—— He hovered for a word, then used face and hands, miming: I can play it but I can’t explain it. I’d rather hear about yours. The accidents and all that."

Yes, but the only important thing in any story is the gaps. And gaps never register. The growth spaces—when you change colour and style and find yourself different without knowing how it happened. You think that love or success or disaster are the big moments, but, looking back, you see it was the little, unnoticed street-corner moments that mattered. And they’re hard to get at.

I know. Like thinking. You start thinking about, say, blankets, and a minute later you find you’re thinking of the nebular theory; and tracing back you see that it was an orderly progression of forty separate steps. . . . But, blimey, we’re getting into deep stuff. Let’s talk about Pearce and Plenty!

Well, at the time of my visits to the Causeway, I was living with Uncle Frank in Poplar, and I was happy there. We lived in one room of the upstairs back of a small house in Carfax Street. It was a street of uniform bald houses of four rooms and scullery. Its parlour windows bayed out to the street, without the grace of one yard of green or the gentility of a gate. Some of the houses, at that time, in a spasm of discontent with their estate, had turned themselves into shops, and had made a bad job of it, being neither good shop nor honest house, but though it was down it grinned. Always there was the noise of dogs and babies, and the cheery calls of neighbour to neighbour and the occult cries of coal-man, winkle-man, milk-man, and balloon-and-flag man. There was no melancholy in Carfax Street. Wonderful people lived there, too. We had a riveter, a French polisher, a turner, a screw-maker, a glass-bender, a carver and gilder, a wheelwright—all of them magicians with their hands; men who could make things. Whenever I heard them talking of their work, I settled my future on the work that was being talked about.

Ours was a jolly little home. The length and breadth of home was exactly five of my paces; I had often marched to war across it with a sword made by Uncle Frank from a broken trowel and a stair-railing. On one side, next the cupboard, was the bed. Against the window was a little deal table with two leaves, both sadly warped, and two chairs. On the right of the fireplace was the pine chest of drawers, containing Sunday clothes and uncle’s treasures; and on the other, the coal-box, the water-can, and the wash-stand. Over the fireplace hung an illuminated scroll in red and gold lettering: Presented to Mr. Reuben Battershell on the occasion of his leaving ‘The Galloping Horses’ as a token of esteem and respect in which he was held by his following friends—and over the bed a coloured supplement on art paper showing Wilson Barret in The Sign of the Cross.

In the past Uncle Frank had been an innkeeper, but he was then gardener at a big house in Greenwich. It was always the Big House, and its owner, except in moments of petulance, The Lady. He still kept the signboard under the bed—The Galloping Horses.—Reuben Battershell. Free House—and it served him as rosary in desolate hours.

Hi, cock. Fetch out the ole signboard. Let’s ’ave a look at ’er. Ha! That was a House, me boy. I wasn’t touching me ’at to nobody then. No fear. I made that House, me boy. Got it cheap. It’d gone down. Doing nothing. In three months, me boy, I couldn’t take the money fast enough.

Why ain’t you got it now, uncle?

Never you mind, me boy. As you get older you’ll learn that there’s ups and downs in everything. And no counting on ’em neither.

I loved Uncle Frank, and it hurts me to-day that I can only remember him as a shiftless figure of fun whom nobody for a moment took seriously. The farcical gestures alone remain—the nods, the winks, the finger at the nose, the rude words, the schoolboy foolery that sorted so ill with his short, round figure. I want to remember the other things—the years of service and companionship, the self-denial and care and thought. And I can’t. I do not think of him sitting up with me all night through a sickness, and working all day and sitting up all the next night. I think of him treading on a rake in the garden and hurting his nose. I think of him falling downstairs over Miss Paske’s cat. I think of him coming home one Bank Holiday wearing a long yellow nose. I see him halfway inside his Sunday shirt, swearing because he couldn’t find the sleeve-holes. I see him always ludicrous in ludicrous situations, always laughing at himself, always facetious in serious moments. I want to think of him with reverence, but the moment I think of him I laugh, and then am ashamed. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps a laughing remembrance counts as high for his welfare as a solemn requiem.

I loved Poplar, too. It had rich company and kind streets and laughter, and ships and water. These things—a work of art and a work of nature—carry beauty and the feeling of adventure wherever they go. They lend colour to the people who have to do with them; and a wet day or a grey twilight is less troublous to the soul if brown sails, red funnels and great spars break up its melancholy. Over the wall of East India Dock lay the world. The world was even with us in the streets, for around the dock and on the point opposite the Tunnel gathered men from all the seven seas. The feeling of travel was always with us. There were ships’ chandlers and junk shops and foreign sailors’ homes, and the very newspaper shops displayed books on ships and navigation and signalling. Always there were movement and the light and space of neighbouring water, and the bells and whistles of departing ships, and grave-eyed sailors to light the poorest alley with the nobility of the sea and the strength of the human heart.

I say I was happy with Uncle Frank and the rough and gusty life of Carfax Street; but often there were those moments of restlessness known to all children—moments of mystery half-perceived—which I couldn’t understand, and which I couldn’t take to Uncle Frank. I divined that he would be beyond solving them, and would think I was ailing. It was then that I would escape down the road and wander in a street of no-time and no-place; a street of spices and golden apples, where men, dark or lemon-faced, wearing the raiment of pantomime, swam through the mist or held the walls in living statuary. There lived all wonder and dismay, and the rewards that come to us in dreams. What drew me to it I do not know, but I loved to be there, to touch shoulders with its shadows, or to stand at the window of Quong Lee filled with a Want that I could not name. I was out of the world of the common things that I knew, lost in a world to which I had no key; a world that, I felt even then, held, behind all its colour, something pale and cold and pitiless; the marble stupor of those who have lived a thousand years and have a thousand more to live, giving no revelation, but turned always inward, solitary and self-sufficient.

I could not, of course, shape it or say it to myself; I could only distress myself with the feeling, and loaf about the Causeway out of tune with myself and my pals of Carfax Street. Although I lived at the waterside, ships and the water had none of the interest for me they had for other boys. Even at ten years old I was interested more in people than in things. But, like all land creatures, I would often go down to it, and stand on the wharf for an hour, staring at the water and the boats, and wondering what it all meant and whether Quong Lee’s shop-window would explain it.

And then, one evening, as I stood in the Causeway staring through his window at him, Quong Lee raised a hand and beckoned. For a moment or so I did not move. I was struck suddenly shy and apprehensive. Then he beckoned again, and I understood that he was inviting me in. This was the moment I had waited and wooed him for. Dare I? I would.

With a sense of desperate adventure, as of cutting myself off from the friendly world, I went in. He smiled. I smiled; though not easily: I was trembling. Then he turned in his seat behind the counter, opened a jar, speared in it with a wooden skewer, and held out to me a piece of ginger.

Again I hesitated; and in the moment of hesitating the thing happened. In that moment I knew a joy sharper than any I had known, and with it came a sense of time arrested and crystallised; a sense of eternity; a fancy that always, behind the curtain of time, this thing had been; that always Quong Lee had been sitting in that shop in that street; that for all time he had been holding out a piece of ginger and I had been standing before him, with the pins-and-needles of emotion in the back of my neck, holding out my hand to him. With it came, too, something more than joy; something that I know now was at once joy and knowledge and understanding and serenity. The Secret. I knew then all the beauty and all the evil of the heart of Asia; its cruelty, its grace and its wisdom. And I felt that whatever else might move or change, whatever comings and goings there might be, Quong Lee and I would not change. Always he would be sitting on a stool behind the counter of that shop, beckoning to me, and always I would be holding out my hand.

Then it was gone. I took the piece of ginger and ate it, smiling from a full mouth, back in the world of time and place; but a world with a difference. Something had happened to me; something beyond the fact that I had got into Quong Lee’s shop; and I knew that shop-windows would never be the same again. I had achieved contact, and the Causeway would be for ever part of me. I had turned my first corner.

When I had eaten the ginger, grinning idiotically all the time, he beckoned me to come round the counter. I went; and he showed me his calculus, his bowl of ink, his writing-brushes, and the pad of flimsy paper on which he made out his bills. He showed me a green-and-yellow Buddha. He showed me a temple carved from six inches of ivory. He took down from the wall one of the many masks with which it was covered—flamboyant affairs of reds and blues and whites and golds—and put it over his face. He showed me prayer-papers and a joss and a pair of chop-sticks, and marvels of banners and pipes writhing with decoration.

And all the time I grinned, not knowing what it was all about or what I was supposed to do or say, or why I was invited in; but thrilled, wildly thrilled, and in love with this shrivelled old foreigner. We all laughed at foreigners then; Foreigners were sp Funny, and none so Funny as the Chinkies. But though, with the others, I had laughed at them, I could not laugh at Quong Lee. I found in him—or put there—the essence of all the things I had felt or seen in the Causeway and in the water. I loved Uncle Frank, but I had never caught myself loving him. I loved him as I ate my breakfast or washed my neck. But this was different; this was sharp feeling. I felt that he had picked upon me, above all other boys, as worthy of his notice, and I wanted to do something for him, to cut a figure before him; to earn his esteem. But I just stood there, sizzling and grinning, until he speared another piece of ginger and pushed me to the door.

I ran home. I ran all the way home, and went straight indoors. But I didn’t tell Uncle Frank or anybody about it Uncle Frank wouldn’t have liked it, and I knew how the chaps would laugh and chiike me for chumming up with a silly old Chinky. So I kept quiet. The outer door of my secret world was half-open, and I must keep it so that I might slip in and out. I could not live in it; the life for me was the life of Carfax Street; the little ordinary things; but I hugged it as one hugs a hiding-place for one’s special treasures which are too precious to be shared.

From those first few minutes with him my life changed, and his shop became my other home. The world was lit up. Until then I had seen things only as things. Now I saw life and meaning (though what meaning I did not know) in every common sight and object of the streets. Evening after evening I went there, looking through the window until I was invited in; and once in, I was free to roam about the place, to eat ginger, and to play with the writing-brushes, while he sat and smiled, or taught me how to write certain characters with the brushes—Courtesy, Kindness, Tranquillity. I was ten; he was as old as the Mountains of the Moon. And he was my friend. At no time was our friendship demonstrative. Though child and man may often talk seriously, on level terms, we could not talk, for at that time he knew only the pidjin of the shopkeeper’s counter. Even later, when he learned more words, he could never make a sentence; he would throw out four or five words, and I had to make the sentence myself.

It was at my fourth visit, I think, that he suddenly coughed, Huh! and said: Why you ’ere? When I understood the question I said: I’m lonely. I don’t know why I said that. It wasn’t true. I had dozens of friends, young and grown up, about Carfax Street. It was a silly thing to say, but it came out; and his reply seemed to me even sillier. He said: "Huh! All time you that. All time. One time plenty people