Love Among the Chickens (New York: 1909)/Chapter 1
MR. JEREMY GARNET stood with his back to the empty grate—for the time was summer—watching with a jaundiced eye the removal of his breakfast things.
"Mrs. Medley," he said.
"Sir?"
"Would it bore you if I became autobiographical?"
"Sir?"
"Never mind. I merely wish to sketch for your benefit a portion of my life's history. At eleven o'clock last night I went to bed, and at once sank into a dreamless sleep. About four hours later there was a clattering on the stairs which shook the house like a jelly. It was the gentleman in the top room—I forget his name—returning to roost. He was humming a patriotic song. A little while later there were a couple of loud crashes. He had removed his boots. All this while snatches of the patriotic song came to me through the ceiling of my bedroom. At about four-thirty there was a lull, and I managed to get to sleep again. I wish when you see that gentleman, Mrs. Medley, you would give him my compliments, and ask him if he could shorten his program another night. He might cut out the song, for a start."
"He's a very young gentleman, sir," said Mrs. Medley, in vague defense of her top room.
"And it's highly improbable," said Garnet, "that he will ever grow old, if he repeats his last night's performance. I have no wish to shed blood wantonly, but there are moments when one must lay aside one's personal prejudices, and act for the good of the race. A man who hums patriotic songs at four o'clock in the morning doesn't seem to me to fit into the scheme of universal happiness. So you will mention it to him, won't you?"
"Very well, sir," said Mrs. Medley, placidly.
On the strength of the fact that he wrote for the newspapers and had published two novels, Mrs. Medley regarded Mr. Garnet as an eccentric individual who had to be humored. Whatever he did or said filled her with a mild amusement. She received his daily harangues in the same spirit as that in which a nurse listens to the outpourings of the family baby. She was surprised when he said anything sensible enough for her to understand.
His table being clear of breakfast and his room free from disturbing influences, the exhilaration caused by his chat with his landlady left Mr. Garnet. Life seemed very gray to him. He was a conscientious young man, and he knew that he ought to sit down and do some work. On the other hand, his brain felt like a cauliflower, and he could not think what to write about. This is one of the things which sour the young author even more than do those long envelopes which so tastefully decorate his table of a morning.
He felt particularly unfitted for writing at that moment. The morning is not the time for inventive work. An article may be polished then, or a half-finished story completed, but 11 A.M. is not the hour at which to invent.
Jerry Garnet wandered restlessly about his sitting room. Rarely had it seemed so dull and depressing to him as it did then. The photographs on the mantelpiece irritated him. There was no change in them. They struck him as the concrete expression of monotony. His eye was caught by a picture hanging out of the straight. He jerked it to one side, and the effect became worse. He jerked it back again, and the thing looked as if it had been hung in a dim light by an astigmatic drunkard. Five minutes' pulling and hauling brought it back to a position only a shade less crooked than that in which he had found it, and by that time his restlessness had grown like a mushroom.
He looked out of the window. The sunlight was playing on the house opposite. He looked at his boots. At this point conscience prodded him sharply.
"I won't," he muttered fiercely, "I will work. I'll turn out something, even if it's the worst rot ever written."
With which admirable sentiment he tracked his blotting pad to its hiding place (Mrs. Medley found a fresh one every day), collected ink and pens, and sat down.
There was a distant thud from above, and shortly afterwards a thin tenor voice made itself heard above a vigorous splashing. The young gentleman on the top floor was starting another day.
"Oi'll—er—sing thee saw-ongs"—brief pause, then in a triumphant burst, as if the singer had just remembered the name—"ovarraby."
Mr. Garnet breathed a prayer and glared at the ceiling.
The voice continued:
"Ahnd—er—ta-ales of fa-arr Cahsh-meerer."
Sudden and grewsome pause. The splashing ceased. The singer could hardly have been drowned in a hip bath, but Mr. Garnet hoped for the best.
His hopes were shattered.
"Come," resumed the young gentleman persuasively, "into the garden, Maud, for ther black batter nah-eet hath—er—florn."
Jerry Garnet sprang from his seat and paced the room.
"This is getting perfectly impossible," he said to himself. "I must get out of this. A fellow can't work in London. I'll go down to some farmhouse in the country. I can't think here. You might just as well try to work at a musical 'At Home.'"
Here followed certain remarks about the young man upstairs, who was now, in lighter vein, putting in a spell at a popular melody from the Gaiety Theater.
He resumed his seat and set himself resolutely to hammer out something which, though it might not be literature, would at least be capable of being printed. A search through his commonplace book brought no balm. A commonplace book is the author's rag bag. In it he places all the insane ideas that come to him, in the groundless hope that some day he will be able to convert them with magic touch into marketable plots.
This was the luminous item which first met Mr. Garnet's eye:
Mem. Dead body found in railway carriage under seat. Only one living occupant of carriage. He is suspected of being the murderer, but proves that he only entered carriage at twelve o'clock in the morning, while the body has been dead since the previous night.
To this bright scheme were appended the words:
This will want some working up.
J. G.
"It will," thought Jerry Garnet grimly, "but it will have to go on wanting as far as I'm concerned."
The next entry he found was a perfectly inscrutable lyric outburst.
There are moments of annoyance,
Void of every kind of joyance,
In the complicated course of Man's affairs;
But the very worst of any
He experiences when he
Meets a young, but active, lion on the stairs.
Sentiment unexceptionable. But as to the reason for the existence of the fragment, his mind was a blank. He shut the book impatiently. It was plain that no assistance was to be derived from it.
His thoughts wandered back to the idea of leaving London. London might have suited Dr. Johnson, but he had come to the conclusion that what he wanted to enable him to give the public of his best (as the reviewer of the Academy, dealing with his last work, had expressed a polite hope that he would continue to do) was country air. A farmhouse by the sea somewhere … cows … spreading boughs … rooks … brooks … cream. In London the day stretches before a man, if he has no regular and appointed work to do, like a long, white, dusty road. It seems impossible to get to the end of it without vast effort. But in the country every hour has its amusements. Up with the lark. Morning dip. Cheery greetings. Local color. Huge breakfast. Long walks. Flannels. The ungirt loin. Good, steady spell of work from dinner till bedtime. The prospect fascinated him. His third novel was already in a nebulous state in his brain. A quiet week or two in the country would enable him to get it into shape.
He took from the pocket of his blazer a letter which had arrived some days before from an artist friend of his who was on a sketching tour in Devonshire and Somerset. There was a penciled memorandum on the envelope in his own handwriting:
Mem. Might work K. L.'s story about M. and the W—s's into comic yarn for one of the weeklies.
He gazed at this for a while, with a last hope that in it might be contained the germ of something which would enable him to turn out a morning's work; but having completely forgotten who K. L. was, and especially what was his (or her) story about M., whoever he (or she) might be, he abandoned this hope and turned to the letter in the envelope.
The earlier portions of the letter dealt tantalizingly with the scenery. "Bits," come upon by accident at the end of disused lanes and transferred with speed to canvas, were described concisely but with sufficient breadth to make Garnet long to see them for himself. There were brief résumés of dialogues between Lickford (the writer) and weird rustics. The whole letter breathed of the country and the open air. The atmosphere of Garnet's sitting room seemed to him to become stuffier with every sentence he read.
The postscript interested him.
"… By the way, at Yeovil I came across an old friend of yours. Stanley Featherstonhaugh Ukridge, of all people. As large as life—quite six foot two, and tremendously filled out. I thought he was abroad. The last I heard of him was that he had started for Buenos Ayres in a cattle-ship. It seems he has been in England sometime. I met him in the refreshment room at Yeovil station. I was waiting for a down train; he had changed on his way to town. As I opened the door I heard a huge voice in a more or less violent altercation, and there was S. F. U., in a villainous old suit of gray flannels (I'll swear it was the same one that he had on last time I saw him), and a mackintosh, though it was a blazing hot day. His pince-nez were tacked onto his ears with wire as usual. He greeted me with effusive shouts, and drew me aside. Then after a few common-places of greeting, he fumbled in his pockets, looked pained and surprised.
"'Look here, Licky,' he said. 'You know I never borrow. It's against my principles. But I must have a shilling, or I'm a ruined man. I seem to have had my pocket picked by some scoundrelly blackguard. Can you, my dear fellow, oblige me with a shilling until next Tuesday afternoon at three-thirty? I never borrow, so I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll let you have this (producing a beastly little three-penny-bit with a hole in it) until I can pay you back. This is of more value to me than I can well express, Licky, my boy. A very, very dear friend gave it to me when we parted, years ago. It's a wrench to part with it. But grim necessity … I can hardly do it. … Still, no, no, … you must take it, you must take it. Licky, old man, shake hands! Shake hands, my boy!'
"He then asked after you, and said you were the noblest man—except me—on earth. I gave him your address, not being able to get out of it, but if I were you I should fly while there is yet time."
"That," said Jerry Garnet, "is the soundest bit of advice I've heard. I will."
"Mrs. Medley," he said, when that lady made her appearance.
"Sir?"
"I'm going away for a few weeks. You can let the rooms if you like. I'll drop you a line when I think of coming back."
"Yes, sir. And your letters. Where shall I send them, sir?"
"Till further notice," said Jerry Garnet, pulling out a giant portmanteau from a corner of the room and flinging it open, "care of the Dalai Lama, No. 3 Younghusband Terrace, Tibet."
"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Medley placidly.
"I'll write you my address to-night. I don't know where I'm going yet. Is that an A. B. C. over there? Good. Give my love to that bright young spirit on the top floor, and tell him that I hope my not being here to listen won't interfere in any way with his morning popular concerts."
"Yes, sir."
"And, Mrs. Medley, if a man named"
Mrs. Medley had drifted silently away. During his last speech a thunderous knocking had begun on the front door.
Jerry Garnet stood and listened, transfixed. Something seemed to tell him who was at the business end of that knocker.
He heard Mrs. Medley's footsteps pass along the hall and pause at the door. Then there was the click of the latch. Then a volume of sound rushed up to him where he stood over his empty portmanteau.
"Is Mr. Garnet in?"
Mrs. Medley's reply was inaudible, but apparently in the affirmative.
"Where is he?" boomed the voice. "Show me the old horse. First floor. Thank you. Where is the man of wrath?"
There followed a crashing on the stairs such as even the young gentleman of the top floor had been unable to produce in his nocturnal rovings. The house shook.
And with the tramping came the thunderous voice, as the visitor once more gave tongue.
"Garnet! Garnet!! GARNET!!!"