“Drive to Ludgate Circus and back, and beat the gentleman on the skates,” said Malim to our driver, who was taking the race as though he assisted at such events in the course of his daily duty.
“Hi shall say, ‘Are you ready? Horf!’”
“We shall have Perkins applying to the Jockey Club for Ernest Willoughby’s job,” whispered Malim.
“Are you ready? Horf!”
Hatton was first off the mark. He raced down the incline to the Circus at a tremendous speed. He was just in sight as he swung laboriously round and headed for home. But meeting him on our outward journey, we noticed that the upward slope was distressing him. “Shall we do it?” we asked.
“Yessir,” said our driver. And now we, too, were on the up grade. We went up the hill at a gallop: were equal with Hatton at Fetter Lane, and reached the Temple Gate yards to the good.
The ancient driver of a four-wheeler had been the witness of the finish.
He gazed with displeasure upon us.
“This ‘ere’s a nice use ter put Fleet Street to, I don’t think,” he said coldly.
This sarcastic rebuke rather damped us, and after Hatton had paid Malim his half-crown, and had invited me to visit him, we departed.
“Queer chap, Hatton,” said Malim as we walked up the Strand.
I was to discover at no distant date that he was distinctly a many-sided man. I have met a good many clergymen in my time, but I have never come across one quite like the Rev. John Hatton.
Chapter 9
JULIAN LEARNS MY SECRET
A difficulty in the life of a literary man in London is the question of getting systematic exercise. At school and college I had been accustomed to play games every day, and now I felt the change acutely.
It was through this that I first became really intimate with John Hatton, and incidentally with Sidney Price, of the Moon Assurance Company. I happened to mention my trouble one night in Hatton’s rooms. I had been there frequently since my first visit.
“None of my waistcoats fit,” I remarked.
“My dear fellow,” said Hatton, “I’ll give you exercise and to spare; that is to say, if you can box.”
“I’m not a champion,” I said; “but I’m fond of it. I shouldn’t mind taking up boxing again. There’s nothing like it for exercise.”
“Quite right, James,” he replied; “and exercise, as I often tell my boys, is essential.”
“What boys?” I asked.
“My club boys,” said Hatton. “They belong to the most dingy quarter of the whole of London—South Lambeth. They are not hooligans. They are not so interesting as that. They represent the class of youth that is a stratum or two above hooliganism. Frightful weeds. They lack the robust animalism of the class below them, and they lack the intelligence of the class above them. The fellows at my club are mostly hardworking mechanics and under-paid office boys. They have nothing approaching a sense of humour or the instinct of sport.”
“Not very encouraging,” I said.
“Nor picturesque,” said Hatton; “and that is why they’ve been so neglected. There is romance in an out-and-out hooligan. It interests people to reform him. But to the outsider my boys are dull. I don’t find them so. But then I know them. Boxing lessons are just what they want. In fact, I was telling Sidney Price, an insurance clerk who lives in Lambeth and helps me at the club, only yesterday how much I wished we could teach them to use the gloves.”
“I’ll take it on, then, Hatton, if you like,” I said. “It ought to keep me in form.”
I found that it did. I ceased to be aware of my liver. That winter I was able to work to good purpose, and the result was that I arrived. It dawned upon me at last that the “precarious” idea was played out. One could see too plainly the white sheet and phosphorus.
And I was happy. Happier, perhaps, than I had ever hoped to be. Happier, in a sense, than I can hope to be again. I had congenial work, and, what is more, I had congenial friends.
What friends they were!
Julian—I seem to see him now sprawling in his hammock, sucking his pipe, planning an advertisement, or propounding some whimsical theory of life; and in his eyes he bears the pain of one whose love and life are spoilt. Julian—no longer my friend.
Kit and Malim—what evenings are suggested by those names.
Evenings alone with Malim at his flat in Vernon Place. An unimpeachable dinner, a hand at picquet, midnight talk with the blue smoke wreathing round our heads.
Well, Malim and I are unlikely to meet again in Vernon Place. Nor shall we foregather at the little house in the Hampstead Road, the house which Kit enveloped in an inimitable air of domesticity. Her past had not been unconnected with the minor stage. She could play on the piano from ear, and sing the songs of the street with a charming cockney twang. But there was nothing of the stage about her now. She was born for domesticity and, as the wife of Malim, she wished to forget all that had gone before. She even hesitated to give us her wonderful imitations of the customers at the fried fish shop, because in her heart she did not think such impersonations altogether suitable for a respectable married woman.
It was Malim who got me elected to the Barrel Club. I take it that I shall pay few more visits there.
I have mentioned at this point the love of my old friends who made my first years in London a period of happiness, since it was in this month of April that I had a momentous conversation with Julian about Margaret.
