A LETTER TO THE FRONT.
"Kin yer write a letter?"
"More or less," I said. I did not rate myself with Madame de Staël nor with Edward Fitzgerald, but I forebore to mention these names because I thought that they would not be familiar to my questioner. If you happen to know Paradise Rents, Fulham, you will realise that neither Madame de Staël, nor Fitzgerald is much read there. Moreover, the type that addressed me had not the aspect of a literary man.
He was a man of some seven years, maybe, in company with a younger man, perhaps of five. He was hatless, coatless, waistcoatless, but he had a pair of trousers, short in the leg, precariously held by one brace. That is the fashion in Paradise Rents. I had come upon these two young men about Fulham as they were staring with absorbed interest into the undertaker's shop advantageously situated for custom at the corner of the Rents and the main street. Certainly it was a pleasant window. Besides the legends and texts, the artificial wreaths and the pictures of tombs and tombstones, there was a number of model coffins in miniature. It was these that had fascinated the attention of the two young men.
"I should like one o' them to ply with," said the elder covetously.
"What would yer do with it, Bill?" the younger asked.
"I'd put the old Kayser in it, along wi' Farver."
It is rude to laugh at other people's conversation, particularly if you have not been introduced to them, but I caught myself in an audible chuckle over this fine blend of patriotic and filial sentiment. Then I pulled myself but not in time; I had been detected.
If you wish to know what it is to be stared at, you should interrupt, as I had, a conversation between two young men of about this age in Fulham or elsewhere. They stared in unison and in silence until the tension became unbearable, and one of them, the elder, whose name was Bill, relieved it with the above quest on, "Kin yer write a letter?"
Perhaps my answer was a little modest. He regarded me doubtfully, then asked—
"'Ow soon kin yer write a letter?"
"You mean, how long does it take me to write a letter?"
He nodded his head vehemently.
"Well," I began, "it rather depends, you know, on what there is to say." I saw dissatisfaction cloud his face, and hastened to add, "Oh, well, about ten minutes."
At that his expression cleared to astonishment. Passing that emotion, it went to incredulity. It was a beautifully legible face, though everything but clean. He made up his mind.
"Will yer come," he asked, "and write a letter for my granmother?"
We were on the heels of adventure now; no one could say what new country this might lead to.
"Where does she live?" I asked.
"Just round the corner, two doors from my Great-aunt Maria's," he said, astonished that I should not know,
"Lead on," I said, concealing my ignorance of the residence of great-aunt Maria.
He took me by the hand, which I could not in courtesy decline, and led me down Paradise Rents.
As a rule, in Paradise Rents, front doors stand open to the street, but the door of Number 5, the abode of Bill's grandmother, was shut. On tip-toe and with a strenuous effort Bill reached the latch. The door opened and Bill shouted through it, by way of introduction:—
"She says she kin write a letter in ten minutes."
The person addressed, whom I understood to be the grandmother, was engaged in scrubbing with a duster a deal table already clean enough to make Bill's face much ashamed of itself. She was a large heavy old woman, with a round colourless visage that suggested the full moon by daylight, and wispy grey locks like a nimbus about it.
"Lor bless the child, Mum!" she exclaimed. "Bill, whatever d'yer mean by it?"
"Says she kin write a letter in ten minutes," Bill repeated, with the emphasis of grave doubt on the "says."
"Bless the child, Mum! I don't know whatever 'e's been saying. It's truth as I did say as I wished I 'ad someone as could write a letter for me to my son Frank, it being 'is birthday Tuesday and 'im out at the Front. But there, it's not to say, as I can't write a letter myself if I'm so minded, but I'm no great scholard and it do take me a long time to finish—each day a word or two. About a week it take me to write a letter, such a letter as I'd wish to write to Frank out at the Front, for 'is birthday, to cheer 'im up."
"Frank's Bill's father, I suppose?" I said, by way of filling an asthmatic pause.
"Lor bless yer, no, Mum. Bill's father wouldn't never go into no more danger than what 'e'd find at the Red Lion. Married my pore daughter 'e did, as died—a mercy for 'er, pore thing! That's 'ow it is Bill's living along o' me."
"I see," I said. "Well, now—about the letter?"
A space more liberal than the operation strictly needed was cleared for me on the polished deal table; a penny ink-bottle and a pen with a rusty but still useful nib set upon it, and from a special drawer, with a solemnity that of the character of sacred ritual, Mrs. Watt, as Bill's grandmother informed me she was called, drew forth a single sheet of notepaper. Its dimensions had been heavily curtailed by the deepest border of mourning black that I ever had seen on English writing-paper. Other nations surpass us in this evidence of respect, but Mrs. Watt's paper was calculated to raise the national standard.
"Isn't this," I said, "rather—I mean is it quite suited for a birthday letter, to cheer up Frank in the trenches?"
Mrs. Watt took the suggestion in quite good part, but gave it a decided negative.
"'E would wish respect showed to 'is Aunt Maria, as died Wednesday was a fortnight. You might tell 'im that, if you please, Mum."
I started off, as bidden, with this mournful communication, under the eye, at first severely critical, then frankly admiring, of Bill's grandmother.
"Lor," she exclaimed, "you be one to write the words quick!"
"What shall we say now?" I asked brightly.
"Wednesday was a fortnight as she died, sister Maria did, that's Frank's aunt, and was buried a Saturday—what's too soon, as you'd say, but no disrespect meant, the undertaker arranging first for the Monday—only 'aving a bigger job, with 'orses and plumes, give'im for the Monday, and so putting my pore sister forward to the Saturday. 'Ave you got that down, Mum?"
"Oh," I said, scribbling briskly, "am I to write all that?" It occupied, even with much compression, space far into the second side of the restricted paper.
"An' my only relative surviving," she resumed, "being brother George, as is eighty-two, and crotchety at that, lives out 'Oxton way, so I wrote to him about the funeral for a Monday, and when the undertaker puts it forward to the Saturday I didn't have no one to send all that way, so brother George—'e's eighty-two, and crotchety at that—'e didn't get no notice for the funeral on Saturday at all, so o' course 'e didn't come. You'll make all that clear to Frank, won't you, Mum?"
I scribbled hard again, and said I was doing my best.
"So brother George being crotchety, as I said, Mum, 'e sent me word as 'e wouldn't never speak to me again in this world, and 'e didn't know as ever 'e would in the world to come—I'd like you to put that all in, please, Mum, so's to let Frank know 'ow it all is. Now, do you suppose, Mum, if I was to die, as brother George'd come to my funeral?"
I hardly knew what answer to make after the "cut everlasting" with which George had threatened his sister, but I had an idea that I was beginning to understand Mrs. Watt's tastes. "Well," I said weakly, "I don't know—funerals are very pleasant things."
It was the right note and Mrs. Watt took it up keenly. "That's what I always says, Mum," she said eagerly. "I'd sooner go to a good funeral than I would a wedding any day of the week. You've got that down about brother George? Yes, and please say as it was beautiful polished wood, the coffin—and real brass 'andles."
"But, Mrs. Watt," I said despairingly, "that'll bring us quite to the end of the paper, and we've never even wished him many happy returns yet. Have you another sheet?"
"I haven't got no more than the one sheet, but I dessay as there's room to say as I'm his loving mother, and 'ope it finds 'im well, as it leaves me."
I managed to pinch in the traditional salutation; the sheet was enclosed in an envelope as sepulchral of aspect as itself, and with much misgiving I put Frank's birthday letter into the first pillar-box that I found.
Just a week later I had occasion to go down Paradise Rents again. I had no intention of calling on Mrs. Watt, being more than a little afraid of the reception that her son Frank might have accorded to the letter that was to bring bright cheer to his birthday. But she ran from her door as I passed to meet and greet me. "Do step in, Mum," she entreated. "I must 'ave you see a letter as come this morning from my son Frank, as is at the Front. Read that, if you please, Mum."
"She must be a real lady that wot comes visiting you," it said. "That was a letter as she wrote. I don't know as ever I read such a beautiful letter. All the trench 'as read it, and they says so too."
I sighed heavily with relief. Mrs. Watt was a judge of her son's literary taste.