Beasts and Super-Beasts
was not very different in her way from thousands of other girls who were
finishing, or beginning, or continuing their teas in London tea-shops at
that exact moment. The odds were enormously in favour of the supposition
that she had never seen the “Yellow Peacock”; obviously she supplied
excellent material for Jocantha’s first experiment in haphazard
benefaction.
Jocantha ordered some tea and a muffin, and then turned a friendly
scrutiny on her neighbour with a view to catching her eye. At that
precise moment the girl’s face lit up with sudden pleasure, her eyes
sparkled, a flush came into her cheeks, and she looked almost pretty. A
young man, whom she greeted with an affectionate “Hullo, Bertie,” came up
to her table and took his seat in a chair facing her. Jocantha looked
hard at the new-comer; he was in appearance a few years younger than
herself, very much better looking than Gregory, rather better looking, in
fact, than any of the young men of her set. She guessed him to be a
well-mannered young clerk in some wholesale warehouse, existing and
amusing himself as best he might on a tiny salary, and commanding a
holiday of about two weeks in the year. He was aware, of course, of his
good looks, but with the shy self-consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, not
the blatant complacency of the Latin or Semite. He was obviously on
terms of friendly intimacy with the girl he was talking to, probably they
were drifting towards a formal engagement. Jocantha pictured the boy’s
home, in a rather narrow circle, with a tiresome mother who always wanted
to know how and where he spent his evenings. He would exchange that
humdrum thraldom in due course for a home of his own, dominated by a
chronic scarcity of pounds, shillings, and pence, and a dearth of most of
the things that made life attractive or comfortable. Jocantha felt
extremely sorry for him. She wondered if he had seen the “Yellow
Peacock”; the odds were enormously in favour of the supposition that he
had not. The girl had finished her tea and would shortly be going back
to her work; when the boy was alone it would be quite easy for Jocantha
to say: “My husband has made other arrangements for me this evening;
would you care to make use of this ticket, which would otherwise be
wasted?” Then she could come there again one afternoon for tea, and, if
she saw him, ask him how he liked the play. If he was a nice boy and
improved on acquaintance he could be given more theatre tickets, and
perhaps asked to come one Sunday to tea at Chelsea. Jocantha made up her
mind that he would improve on acquaintance, and that Gregory would like
him, and that the Fairy Godmother business would prove far more
entertaining than she had originally anticipated. The boy was distinctly
presentable; he knew how to brush his hair, which was possibly an
imitative faculty; he knew what colour of tie suited him, which might be
intuition; he was exactly the type that Jocantha admired, which of course
was accident. Altogether she was rather pleased when the girl looked at
the clock and bade a friendly but hurried farewell to her companion.
Bertie nodded “good-bye,” gulped down a mouthful of tea, and then
produced from his overcoat pocket a paper-covered book, bearing the title
“Sepoy and Sahib, a tale of the great Mutiny.”
The laws of tea-shop etiquette forbid that you should offer theatre
tickets to a stranger without having first caught the stranger’s eye. It
is even better if you can ask to have a sugar basin passed to you, having
previously concealed the fact that you have a large and well-filled sugar
basin on your own table; this is not difficult to manage, as the printed
menu is generally nearly as large as the table, and can be made to stand
on end. Jocantha set to work hopefully; she had a long and rather
high-pitched discussion with the waitress concerning alleged defects in
an altogether blameless muffin, she made loud and plaintive inquiries
about the tube service to some impossibly remote suburb, she talked with
brilliant insincerity to the tea-shop kitten, and as a last resort she
upset a milk-jug and swore at it daintily. Altogether she attracted a
good deal of attention, but never for a moment did she attract the
attention of the boy with the beautifully-brushed hair, who was some
thousands of miles away in the baking plains of Hindostan, amid deserted
bungalows, seething bazaars, and riotous barrack squares, listening to
the throbbing of tom-toms and the distant rattle of musketry.
Jocantha went back to her house in Chelsea, which struck her for the
first time as looking dull and over-furnished. She had a resentful
conviction that Gregory would be uninteresting at dinner, and that the
play would be stupid after dinner. On the whole her frame of mind showed
a marked divergence from the purring complacency of Attab, who was again
curled up in his corner of the divan with a great peace radiating from
every curve of his body.
But then he had killed his sparrow.
ON APPROVAL
Of all the genuine Bohemians who strayed from time to time into the
would-be Bohemian circle of the Restaurant Nuremberg, Owl Street, Soho,
none was more interesting and more elusive than Gebhard Knopfschrank. He
had no friends, and though he treated all the restaurant frequenters as
acquaintances he never seemed to wish to carry the acquaintanceship
beyond the door that led into Owl Street and the outer world. He dealt
with them all rather as a market woman might deal with chance passers-by,
exhibiting her wares and chattering about the weather and the slackness
of business, occasionally about rheumatism, but never showing a desire to
penetrate into their daily lives or to dissect their ambitions.
He was understood to belong to a family of peasant farmers, somewhere in
Pomerania; some two years ago, according to all that was known of him, he
had abandoned the labours and responsibilities of swine tending and goose
rearing to try his fortune as an artist in London.
“Why London and not Paris or Munich?” he had been asked by the curious.
Well, there was a ship that left Stolpmünde for London twice a month,
that carried few passengers, but carried them cheaply; the railway fares
to Munich or Paris were not cheap. Thus it was that he came to select
London as the scene of his great adventure.
The question that had long and seriously agitated the frequenters of the
Nuremberg was whether this goose-boy migrant was really a soul-driven
genius, spreading his wings to the light, or merely an enterprising young
man who fancied he could paint and was pardonably anxious to escape from
the monotony of rye bread diet and the sandy, swine-bestrewn plains of
Pomerania. There was reasonable ground for doubt and caution; the
artistic groups that foregathered at the little restaurant contained so
many young women with short hair and so many young men with long hair,
who supposed themselves to be abnormally gifted in the domain of music,
poetry, painting, or stagecraft, with little or nothing to support the
supposition, that a self-announced genius of any sort in their midst was
inevitably suspect. On the other hand, there was the ever-imminent
danger of entertaining, and snubbing, an angel unawares. There had been
the lamentable case of Sledonti, the dramatic poet, who had been
belittled and cold-shouldered in the Owl Street hall of judgment, and had
been afterwards hailed as a master singer by the Grand Duke Constantine
Constantinovitch—“the most educated of the Romanoffs,” according to
Sylvia Strubble, who spoke rather as one who knew every individual member
of the Russian imperial family; as a matter of fact, she knew a newspaper
correspondent, a young man who ate _bortsch_ with the air of having
invented it. Sledonti’s “Poems of Death and Passion” were now being sold
by the thousand in seven European languages, and were about to be
translated into Syrian, a circumstance which made the discerning critics
of the Nuremberg rather shy of maturing their future judgments too
rapidly and too irrevocably.
As regards Knopfschrank’s work, they did not lack opportunity for
inspecting and appraising it. However resolutely he might hold himself
aloof from the social life of his restaurant acquaintances, he was not
minded to hide his artistic performances from their inquiring gaze.
Every evening, or nearly every evening, at about seven o’clock, he would
make his appearance, sit himself down at his accustomed table, throw a
bulky black portfolio on to the chair opposite him, nod round
indiscriminately at his fellow-guests, and commence the serious business
of eating and drinking. When the coffee stage was reached he would light
a cigarette, draw the portfolio over to him, and begin to rummage among
its contents. With slow deliberation he would select a few of his more
recent studies and sketches, and silently pass them round from table to
table, paying especial attention to any new diners who might be present.
On the back of each sketch was marked in plain figures the announcement
“Price ten shillings.”
If his work was not obviously stamped with the hall-mark of genius, at
any rate it was remarkable for its choice of an unusual and unvarying
theme. His pictures always represented some well-known street or public
place in London, fallen into decay and denuded of its human population,
in the place of which there roamed a wild fauna, which, from its wealth
of exotic species, must have originally escaped from Zoological Gardens
and travelling beast shows. “Giraffes drinking at the fountain pools,
Trafalgar Square,” was one of the most notable and characteristic of his
studies, while even more sensational was the gruesome picture of
“Vultures attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street.” There were
also photographs of the large canvas on which he had been engaged for
some months, and which he was now endeavouring to sell to some
enterprising dealer or adventurous amateur. The subject was “Hyænas
asleep in Euston Station,” a composition that left nothing to be desired
in the way of suggesting unfathomed depths of desolation.
“Of course it may be immensely clever, it may be something epoch-making
in the realm of art,” said Sylvia Strubble to her own particular circle
of listeners, “but, on the other hand, it may be merely mad. One mustn’t
pay too much attention to the commercial aspect of the case, of course,
but still, if some dealer would make a bid for that hyæna picture, or
even for some of the sketches, we should know better how to place the man
and his work.”
“We may all be cursing ourselves one of these days,” said Mrs.
Nougat-Jones, “for not having bought up his entire portfolio of sketches.
At the same time, when there is so much real talent going about, one does
not feel like planking down ten shillings for what looks like a bit of
whimsical oddity. Now that picture that he showed us last week,
‘Sand-grouse roosting on the Albert Memorial,’ was very impressive, and
of course I could see there was good workmanship in it and breadth of
treatment; but it didn’t in the least convey the Albert Memorial to me,
and Sir James Beanquest tells me that sand-grouse don’t roost, they sleep
on the ground.”
Whatever talent or genius the Pomeranian artist might possess, it
certainly failed to receive commercial sanction. The portfolio remained
bulky with unsold sketches, and the “Euston Siesta,” as the wits of the
Nuremberg nicknamed the large canvas, was still in the market. The
outward and visible signs of financial embarrassment began to be
noticeable; the half-bottle of cheap claret at dinner-time gave way to a
small glass of lager, and this in turn was displaced by water. The
one-and-sixpenny set dinner receded from an everyday event to a Sunday