The Man of Iron

by Richard Dehan

XV

When the Editorial Staff of the Early Wire had gone home, or to the Club, by cab or private brougham or on foot, in the blackest hours of the night or the smallest hours of the morning; when the Printing Staff had filed out, pale and respectably attired, or thundered down the iron-shod staircases in grimy, inky, oily déshabillé, then the Publishing Staff trooped in and took possession. And, as the lines of carts backed up to the curb, and were filled by brawny shirt-sleeved men, who tossed the huge bales of newspapers from hand to hand with the nonchalant skill of jugglers doing tricks with willow-pattern plates and oranges, the Business Department began to empty so much that you could see the eyebrows of clerks behind the iron-nailed unplaned deal counters; and Mr. Knewbit, slackening in his terrific energy, would cease keeping count, and tallying, and writing cabalistic signs on huge packages with the stump of blue pencil that never was used up. And he would mop his face and say—in the same invariable formula:

"Well! we've broke the back of the day's work, and lucky if no one can say no worse of us!"

Later on, when the last newspaper-cart had been gorged and rattled away, and the last newspaper-boy had darted out with his armful, and his mouth open for the yell that would issue from it the moment his bare feet hit the pavement of Fleet Street, and the office of the Early Wire and all the other offices that had got off the Morning Issue had an air of dozing with blinking eyes and mouths half open—when the Evening Papers were at the height of strenuous effort,—Mr. Knewbit would arrange the limited supply of hair remaining on his cranium with a pocket-comb, titivate his whiskers by the aid of a tiny scrap of looking-glass nailed inside his desk-lid, dust the blacks off his collar, straighten his cravat—which boasted a breastpin that was an oval plaque of china, painted with a miniature of a young lady with flowing ringlets, rosy cheeks, white arms and shoulders, pink legs and a diaphanous tutu, dancing, crowned with roses in front of a sylvan waterfall,—and betake himself out to dine.

Sometimes he would patronize the "Old Cheshire Cheese" chop-house, where they gave you beefsteak puddings on Saturdays. Or "The Cock" would have his custom, or he would drop in at an eating-house in St. Paul's Churchyard, where Irish stew, boiled beef with dumplings and carrots, or tripe and onions were the staple dishes in winter months. In summer you got roast mutton and green peas and gooseberry tart with custard; but whatever the season or the dish, it was always washed down with whisky-and-water, or gin-and-lemonade, or the strongest of strong beer.

For this particular tavern was patronized by the penny-a-liners of Paternoster Row and the vicinity; out-at-elbows, and generally seedy-looking literary free-lances, who picked up a living by inditing touching tracts and poignant pamphlets for religious Societies bearing arresting titles, such as:

"STOP! YOU ARE OUT AT THE GATHERS! Or, The Tale of a Skirt," and "DEAD LOCKS FOR LIVE HEADS! By A Converted Hairdresser." Or biographical accounts of the brief lives and protracted deaths of Little E——, aged seven, or Miss Madeline P—— of X——.

Bearded men these, with bulbous noses, studded with ruby pimples; full of strange oaths, reveling in profane jest and scurrilous talk. Lanky youths with hollow eyes, uncut hair and crimson neckties, who boasted of having cast off all shackles, bonds and fetters, civil, social, moral and religious, and dreamed in their wilder moments of the inauguration of a second British Commonwealth, and the reign of a New Era of Socialism, and the planting of the Tree of Liberty in Buckingham Palace Courtyard....

And over their strong meats, and the stronger liquors with which they moistened them, these would discuss the plots of tracts, and so forth, seasoning their discourse with highly-spiced pleasantries and salacious witticisms, jesting in ribald sort at all things upon earth and elsewhere; until—as Mr. Knewbit frequently said—you expected the ceiling to come down and strike 'em speechless, and fancied you saw wicked little hellish flames playing about the cutlery.

"Not that I ever read any of their stuff, you know!" he explained to P. C. Breagh, "though I am a man that, to a certain extent, might be considered a reader. You've seen my library on the shelf by my bed-head, and though three books might be held—in the opinion of some people—to constitute rather a limited library, they're the three best books that ever were written or ever will be. Bar none!"

He was a Christian believer himself; of the easy-going, undenominational, non-Church-going kind. And when Sunday came round, Miss Ling, after seeing the beef and potatoes and Yorkshire-pudding safely into the oven, would charge him to watch over the same and guard them from burning; and put on her best bonnet and pop over to the Christian Mission Army Hall that used to be in Judd Street, W.C., for a supply of red-hot doctrine sufficient to stand her in a week of working-days, while Mr. Knewbit smoked, kept an eye on the cooking, and occasionally dipped into his library.

A popular edition of the Plays and Poems by one William Shakespeare, together with a stout and bulky volume, "Gallowglass's Encyclopaedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote," and a worm-eaten, black-leather-bound copy of the Bible—as translated from the Latin Vulgate and published by the English College at Douay A.D. 1609, formed Mr. Knewbit's library. In the pages of these, their owner frequently stated it as his opinion, might be found the finest literature in the world. He always ended:

"And I bought Gallowglass for half-a-crown off a barrow in Camberwell, and Shakespeare was give me by a young fellow who found him dullish reading—and the Book that beats 'em both I picked up in the fourpenny box at a second-hand bookseller's in Clement's Inn!"

King Solomon and the son of Sirach of Jerusalem, with the Prophets Isaiah and Hosea, were Mr. Knewbit's favorite Old Testament authors. Of the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus he never wearied. One wonders how much he understood, but he quarried diligently in their pages, and sometimes emerged into the light figuratively laden with jewels. Marvelous passages would drive home to the brain of the man in blinding flashes of illumination, and he would lose the place in his excitement,—being an unmethodical if omnivorous reader,—and never be able to find them again.... So he quoted his Prophets from memory and generally inaccurately, yet seldom without point or inappropriately. At other times, wearied with their glorious obscurity, he reverted to the plainest and simplest of all the stories ever written, and the sweetest and the saddest too....

He spoke of the Saviour as though he had known Him....

"I never could forgive them fellers"—I conceive he meant the Disciples—"for cutting off and leaving Him to be pinched by that gang in the Garden. It was mean, that's what I call it. Mean! But I will say they owned up their shabbiness in their writings afterward. Though you notice they hurry over that part. And I'm not surprised! That young feller downstairs yet, Maria?"

This was at eight o 'clock on the Sunday morning following Mr. Knewbit's meeting with Carolan on Waterloo Bridge. Miss Ling, stepping nimbly about the big front kitchen in the basement, busy with her task of getting breakfast, returned that "Mr. Breagh had got up and gone out at half-past six."

"For a shave?"

Mr. Knewbit rubbed his own bristly chin rather dubiously as he asked the question. Miss Ling, impaling a round of stale loaf upon a tin toasting-fork, shook her neat head and answered in the negative. Mr. Breagh had mentioned that he was going to church.

"To church.... We'll hope he has gone," said Mr. Knewbit still more dubiously, "though between me and you and the toasting-fork it sounds too good to be true.... And 'The Brunswick Arms' is handy round the corner. If the young man don't rattle at the area-gate by the time you've finished your toasting, I shall made bold to go and look for him at the Bar. Hulloa! Here he is! Now, that's what you might call a pleasant disappointment!"

For he had glanced up at the strip of area-railings commanded by the upper panes of the kitchen window, and seen the legs of P. C. Breagh stride by at a great rate, stop, turn back, and descend the area-steps.

You are to see Miss Ling receiving his morning greeting with the wide smile that revealed an unbroken row of sound white teeth ("every one her own," as Mr. Knewbit would say) and made her thin, triangular face so pleasant. She was a staid spinster, owning to forty-nine, who would have died rather than confess to being fifty. Her magnificent hair, genuinely black and shining like ebony, was coiled upon the top of her head too tightly for beauty. Her well-marked eyebrows and candid brown eyes slanted a little upward at the temples, and her skin was rather yellowish than olive. She was of a flat and bony figure, active and sound and tough, and, in a plain way, a first-rate cook and caterer.

"Though when I left her Ladyship the Countess of Crowmarsh," said Miss Ling, "after fourteen years spent in the Castle nurseries, gradually rising from nursery-maid to under-nurse, and then becoming what his Lordship was pleased to call Head of the Bottle Department—a very humorous nobleman his Lordship was at times!—I had forgotten all I ever knew of my dear mother's kitchen-teaching—she was a cook, Mr. Breagh, who had lived with the first in the land! and when—being pensioned by the family—I decided to risk the step of taking this house, and letting it out to lodgers, preferring single gentlemen—I was forced to engage a widowed person to prepare their meals at first."

"I remember her," said Mr. Knewbit, with his mouth full of poached eggs and bacon. "She could under-boil a pertater and calcine a chop with any elderly female I ever yet come across. Here, pussy! if you ain't too proud for rasher-rinds? And not you!" He leaned to the hearth—he was sitting with his back to the glowing range, and dropped his offering under the nose of the ginger kitten, which, having already disposed of a saucer of bread-and-milk, instantly grabbed.

"To-morrow," said P. C. Breagh, looking up from his rapidly-emptying plate with the smile which Miss Ling had already decided was pleasant, "I hope to prove to you that, like the kitten, I am not too proud for anything that comes in my way."

"Presently, presently!" said Mr. Knewbit sharply. "Everything in good time! ... I don't like to be hurried. And—what did you say was the property you'd left with the—the Greedy Guts who runs that Euston Road hotel?"

"There were three boxes of books—chiefly works on medicine and surgery." Carolan reflected a moment, stirring his coffee with one of Miss Ling's Britannia-metal spoons. "And two trunks, with clothes and all that. Things I valued. My student's cap and schläger, and the silver-mounted beer-horn the English Colony gave me, and—a Crucifix that was my mother's." The speaker blinked and spoke a little huskily: "Used to hang over my bed when I was a little chap in frocks."

"Don't be cast down. Some wave o' luck may wash your property ashore at your feet one of these days. What I will say is—I wish I had the setting-up of that story for the paper!" said Mr. Knewbit, handing in his plate for fried bread. "Supposing you,"—he jerked his eyes at Carolan—"had any talent in the literary line, it 'ud be worth your while to throw off a quarter-col. of descriptive stuff."

"Relating to my experiences in that fellow's bug-ridden lodging-house? Why, I don't doubt I could—after a fashion," said P. C. Breagh.

"After a fashion won't do. Write it the best you know! Sit down at the kitchen-table here, when Maria's gone to her prayer-meeting and I've got my pipe and Solomon to keep me quiet,—and blacken half a quire o' paper—there's plenty in the drawer there!—with the story—told short, crisp and plain, and with a dash o' humor, and within four hundred words. It would space out lovely!" said Mr. Knewbit, arranging imaginary head-lines on the clean coarse tablecloth.

LONDON SHARK
VICTIMIZES STUDENT!
HE GRABS HIS GOODS
AND LETS HIM GO!

"Ah, dear me! If I had had your education. But it's too late to alter that. What were you saying, Maria?"

Miss Ling was hoping that Mr. Breagh had passed a comfortable night?

"First rate, ma'am, many thanks to you!" returned the object of her solicitude.

"For," said Miss Ling, with a homely kind of dignity, "if anything was wanting, Mr. Breagh must make excuses. The arrival being unlooked-for and the notice very short."

"Dropped on you out of the skies, didn't he, Maria?" chuckled Mr. Knewbit. "And you've put him, for the present, in Mr. Ticking's bed!"

"In Mr. Ticking's bed!—Mr. Ticking," explained Miss Ling, turning to the new arrival, "who rents our third-floor front, being in the country for his holidays."

P. C. Breagh expressed the hope that Mr. Ticking would not be offended.

"Lord bless you, no!" responded Mr. Knewbit. "Ticking's an agreeable feller. He'd take you rather as a Boon than otherwise. Contributes a column of cheerful, gossipy items weekly to half-a-dozen of the suburban and district newspapers that are springing up around us like—like mushrooms. Always on the look-out for copy—Ticking is! Now Mounteney——"

"Mr. Mounteney—who is also away on his vacation, and rents the front sitting-room on our ground-floor, and the bedroom behind it," said Miss Ling, "is a gentleman who—owing to the nature of his professional employment—is very refined and sensitive."

"Edits the Health and Beauty column of the Ladies' Mentor," said Mr. Knewbit, crunching fried bread noisily, "and is altogether too ladylike a gentleman to take a liberty with. For the rest, we are Full Up. To begin with, I occupy a combined bed-and-sitting room behind this kitchen, and Miss Ling occupies the large front garret bedroom; the back one being partitioned off as a Box and Lumber room, and a bedroom for the servant gal, who is now having her breakfast in the scullery, as me and Miss Ling agreed would be more considerate toward you.... Coming down again to the first-floor, the front parlor and back bedroom are rented by a German gentleman, Mr. Van Something——"

"Herr von Rosius," interpolated Miss Ling, "who is a teacher at the Institute of Languages in Berners Street.... Second-floor front, another combined bed-and-sitting ... Monsieur Meguet, a French gentleman who is studying Prints at the British Museum. Second-floor back, Miss Kindell, who is a copier of Pictures at the National Gallery, and a sweet artist. Third-floor, Mr. Ticking——"

"You represent him for the present," said Mr. Knewbit, nodding at Carolan.

"The trouble is, and I hope Mr. Breagh will forgive me for mentioning it," hesitated Miss Ling, "that Mr. Ticking comes back to-morrow night...."

"And when does Miss Morency go? ... Miss Morency," explained Mr. Knewbit without waiting for an answer, "is a young person who don't give satisfaction,—regarded as a lodger,—and there you have the truth in a nutshell—Brazil for choice! And Miss Ling's good-nature has led her, before now, to take in such people, and be taken in by 'em too, I'm bound to say!"

The little man broke off as Miss Ling, mindful of P. C. Breagh's flushed and uneasy countenance, coughed warningly.

"Miss Morency has been brought up very well, and is—she has told me,—the daughter of a clergyman in Hertfordshire," she explained as Mr. Knewbit buried his confusion in his coffee-cup. "I cannot but think it right—under the circumstances—to give Miss Morency a little time to turn round."

"She's been turning round for eight weeks," said Mr. Knewbit, rubbing his nose irritably. "And—if I was you, I'd have my latchkey back."

"To ask it would be a want of confidence, which would wound Miss Morency, and upset her," returned Miss Ling, who had risen and was gathering the breakfast things together in rather an agitated way. She added: "And willfully to hurt a person's feelings is a thing I could not bring myself to do, Solomon. And she goes out, evening after evening, poor thing, to call on relatives who live in distant parts of London, and is hardly ever back until very late indeed!"

"She come in at two o'clock this morning," said Mr. Knewbit, screwing up his eyes meaningly at Carolan. "And—being comparatively early myself on Saturdays—I heard her—just as I was getting between the sheets. And being anxious to solve the problem as to Why a young creature like that should go out walking on two feet—and them remarkably small and pretty ones!—and come back with Four—and two of 'em uncommon big and heavy ones, I slipped up the kitchen-stairs and looked round the corner-post. 'The seeing eye and the hearing ear,' said my namesake, 'the Lord hath made them both' ... and then, just as I was a-going to ring the garret-bell and bring you down out of bed in your curl-papers, Maria, I remembered, 'Lie not in wait for wickedness in the house of the just, nor spoil his rest,' 'him' being understood as 'her,' for you're a just woman! But judgment must be executed upon the daughter of Rahab, whether it's Sunday or whether it ain't!"

"When you begin quoting from the prophets, it takes a cleverer than me to understand you," said Miss Ling, flushed to the top of her high cheekbones. "But as a woman that's her elder, I will stand up for that poor unprotected young creature against any man that tries to take her character away!"

"It's nearly time for the Prayer Meeting at the Headquarters Branch Hall of your Christian Mission Army," said Mr. Knewbit, looking at an enormous silver watch he wore, and always set by the Tower clock at Westminster, and calmly taking the poker from the rail above the kitchen-range. "If you'll put on your bonnet and go, what I have made up my mind to do will be comfortably over before the General, or the Colonel, or whichever of 'em is set down to give you Blood and Fire this morning, has fairly warmed to the fight. But if you want to be upset and made uncomfortable in your mind for a week afterwards—you'll stop! You will? Very well, and why not in your own house? Mr. Breagh, will you kindly follow with Miss Ling and act as Reserve Force in this emergency? I thank you, young gentleman!"

And armed with the poker, Mr. Knewbit left the kitchen, followed by Carolan and the landlady, closely attended by the ginger kitten, and mounted the stairs to the third-floor back.