IV
His unfailing sense of humour, his boyish and buoyant love of fun, like the cork jacket by means of which a swimmer rides an incoming wave, carried Stone through difficulties which would have depressed another. Let me put one such instance on record. To brighten in any way the drab days of the poorest folks in his East End parish, he counted a privilege as well as a happiness, and he was constantly devising means for bringing some new gladness to their lives—the gift of a sorely needed bit of furniture, or a coveted ornament, a boating party with the children in Victoria Park, a magic-lantern entertainment—anything in fact which seemed to him likely to make them forget their many troubles and to call them out of themselves.
Most of the women in his parish were poor, many pitifully so. Here was a wife toiling all day in a laundry, to keep the home together, while her husband was out of work, or worse still, while her husband was on the drink; and there, a widow, the sole support of several children.
One day when Stone received an unexpected cheque—I think it was for the sale of his book of poems—he unfolded to me, radiant himself with happiness at the thought, a plan for taking some score of the very poorest mothers of the parish for an outing to Southend.
The great day—as it was in the lives of these poor people—came, and was fortunately fine. The party caught an early train to Southend, spent a long summer day by the sea, gathered at the appointed time, happy if tired, at the railway station, to find that Stone had misread the time-table, and that the last train to London had just gone. Here were some twenty mothers—mostly with husbands who looked to them for the preparation and cooking of supper at night, and of breakfast next morning. To these husbands telegrams of explanation and appeasement must, if the worse came to the worst, and return that night were impossible, be despatched. Other mothers there were with children awaiting their mother’s home-coming for a last meal and to be put to bed; and all the twenty good women—if to London they could not get that night—themselves requiring supper, and some decent place in which to sleep. Stone’s face, brick-red with mortified self-anger at his own muddling, as the agitated mothers crowded and clamoured around him, two or three shrilly or tearfully expatiating on the terrible things that would await them at the hands of their lord and master, should that lord and master and the children go supperless to bed, and rise breakfastless next morning, was, I am told, a study in dismay and bewilderment, until he discovered that, by paying for it out of his own pocket, a special train could be run.
Relieved to find that no one except himself would have to suffer for his carelessness, and even while ruefully regarding the document by the signing of which he made himself responsible for the entire cost (no inconsiderable sum to a poor man as he was) of the special train, the Gilbertian side of the situation—that he, a bachelor, should have a score of wives and mothers upon his hands—dawned upon him. He broke, so my informant tells me, into bluff and hearty Berserker-like laughter, till his chestnut beard wagged, and his burly form rocked; and vowing that—though he must in consequence go short for many a day of every luxury—the lesson he had received, and the story which he would then be able to tell against himself, were cheap at the price, he signed the document, and made mock of himself and his own carelessness all the way home.
Another story was once told me of Stone, concerning the accuracy of which I have my doubts. What happened might well, I admit, have happened to him, but my impression is that it was a friend of his who was the guilty party. However, here is the story, as it was told me, of Stone.
He was to take an afternoon service at a church—I think in Hoxton. Like many poets and some clergymen he was not always punctual, and when he arrived he surmised, by the fact that the bell had stopped, and that there was no thin and dribbling stream of late-comers filing through the doors, that he was more than a little late. The congregation as he saw was on its knees, so diving into the vestry, which was empty, he hastily threw his surplice over his head, and hurrying to his place in the chancel, read out the opening words of the Evening Prayer.
“When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive,” and thence passed on to the familiar “Dearly beloved brethren,” and so on to the end of the service—to discover when returning to the vestry, that he had inflicted upon the unfortunate congregation the penance of two Evensongs on the same afternoon. He had been under the impression that the service commenced at four o’clock, whereas the hour fixed was three. In Stone’s absence the curate-in-charge had felt that there was nothing for it but for him, the curate, to read the service himself, which he did, and in fact he had made an end of it, had pronounced the Benediction, and for some reason had left the church, not by the vestry, but by another door leading direct to the vicarage. It was the custom at the church in question for the congregation to stand while the clergy were passing out, and to return to their knees for a brief silent prayer, after the clergy had passed out. It was at this moment that Stone is supposed to have arrived and hurried in, to begin the service all over again.