The Record of Nicholas Freydon / An Autobiography

by A. J. Dawson

As my earnings rose--and they did rise with agreeable rapidity after my establishment in Howard Street--I wrote less and thought more. I also walked more, and saw more of London, But I was still writing a great deal; more probably than any salaried journalist in the town, though a large proportion of my writings never saw the light of print. When I had been living for five or six months in Howard Street, my earnings were averaging from ten pounds to fifteen pounds each month. For a long time I seemed able to maintain something like this average, but not to improve upon it. It may be that my efforts slackened at that point, and that I gave more time to reading and walking. This is the more likely, because I know I felt no interest whatever in the progress of the account I opened in the Post Office savings bank.

It was about this time, I fancy, though only in my twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, that I began seeking advice from chemists and their assistants, under whose guidance I tapped the fascinating but deadly field of patent medicines. The fact was I had completely disorganised my digestive system during two years and more of catering for myself upon an average outlay of six or seven shillings weekly (sometimes much less, of course), whilst living an insanely sedentary life in which the allowance of sleep, exercise, and fresh air had been as inadequate as my dietary. A wise physician might possibly have been able to steer me into smooth waters now, especially if he had driven me out of London. But the obstinate energy and conceit of youth was still strong in my veins. I had no money to waste on doctors, I told myself. And so I held desultory consultations across the counters of chemist's shops, and, supremely ignorant as to causes, attacked symptoms with trustful energy, consuming great quantities of mostly valueless and frequently harmful nostrums.

Another step I took at this time, after quaintly earnest discussion with Fanny, was to arrange an additional payment of eight shillings a week to Mrs. Pelly, in return for the provision of my very simple breakfast and a bread and cheese luncheon each day. This relieved me of a task for which I had never had much patience, and very likely it was also an economy. My evening meal I preferred, as a general thing, to obtain elsewhere. It was one of my few entertainments this foraging after inexpensive dinners, and watching and listening to other diners. At that time my prejudices were the exact antithesis of those that came later on, and I preferred foreign restaurants and foreign service and cooking, quite apart from the fact that I found them nearly always cheaper and more entertaining than the native varieties.

It was in a dingy little French eating-house near Wardour Street (where I must say the cooking at that time really was skilful, though I dare say the material used was villainously bad, since the prices charged were low, even judged by my scale in such matters) that I first made the acquaintance of Sidney Heron. I felt sure that Heron must be a remarkable man, even before I spoke to him, or heard him speak, for he lived with a monocle fixed in his right eye, and never moved it, even when he blew his nose and gesticulated violently, as he so often did. The monocle was attached to a broad black ribbon which, in some way, seemed grotesque as contrasted with the dingy greyish-white flannel cricketing shirts which Heron always wore, with a red tie under the collar. Linen in any guise he clearly scorned. I do not think his boots were ever cleaned, and he appeared to spend even less upon clothing than I did. I do not know just how he disposed of his money, but he earned two hundred or three hundred a year as a writer, and he was invariably short of funds. I think it quite conceivable that he may have maintained some poor relation or relations, but in all the years of our acquaintance I never heard him mention a relative. He certainly lived poorly himself.

Our acquaintance resulted from his tipping a rum omelette into my lap. The tables at this little restaurant were exceptionally narrow, and I suppose Heron was exceptionally cross, even for him. The omelette was burnt, he said, and after pishing and tushing over it for a moment or two he shouted to the overworked waiter, giving his plate so angry a thrust at the same time that it collided violently with mine, and the offending omelette ricochetted into my lap.

Heron's apologies indicated far more of anger than contrition, I thought; but they led to conversation, at all events, and as he lived in the Hampstead Road we walked a mile or more together after leaving the restaurant. It was the beginning of companionship of a sort for me, and if we did not ever become very close friends, at all events our intimacy endured without rupture for many years.

At the outset I was given an inkling of the irascibility of his temper, and my subsequent method, in all our intercourse, was simply to leave him whenever he became quarrelsome, and to take up our relations when next we met at the point immediately preceding that at which temper had overcome him. At heart an honourable and I am sure kindly man, Heron had a temper of remarkable susceptibility to irritation. The stomachic causes which, as time went on, produced melancholy and dense, black depression in me, probably accounted for his eruptions of violent irascibility. And I fancy we were equally ignorant and brutal in our treatment of our own physical weaknesses.

Heron certainly became one of my distractions, one of my human interests outside work, at this time. But there was another, and the other came closer home to me.

I suppose I spent seven or eight months in discovering that Mrs. Pelly was a singularly unpleasant woman. But the thing did eventually become plain to me, so plain indeed that it would have caused me to give up my French window and writing-table and migrate once more, but for certain considerations outside my own personal comfort. That Mrs. Pelly consumed far more gin than was good for her became apparent to me during my first week, if not my first day, in Howard Street. But as she rarely entered my room, and our encounters were merely accidental and momentary, this weakness would never have affected me much.

What did affect me was my very gradual discovery of the fact that this woman treated her own daughter with systematic cruelty--a thing happily unusual in her class, as it is also, I think, among the very poor of London. At the end of eight or nine months my increasing knowledge of Mrs. Pelly's harsh unkindness to Fanny had begun to weigh on my mind a good deal. It was a singular case, in many ways. Here was a girl, a young woman rather, in her twenty-first year, who to all intents and purposes might be said to be carrying on with her own hands the entire work of a house which sheltered five lodgers; and, as a fact, it was rarely that a day passed without her suffering actual physical violence at the hands of that gin-soaked termagant, her mother.