The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories

The landlord regarded her with surprise and scorn. It was the first time that his daughter had ventured to express herself so unmistakably.

'The Pig and Whistle!' he exclaimed. 'A pothouse! I who have kept an hotel and entertained His Royal Highness. You speak like an ignorant woman. Hold your tongue, and don't dare to let me hear your voice again until to-morrow morning!'

Miss Fouracres obeyed him. She was absolutely mute for the rest of the evening, save when obliged to exchange a word or two with rustic company or in the taproom. Her features expressed uneasiness rather than mortification.

The next day, after an early breakfast, Mr. Fouracres set forth to the town of Woodbury. He had the face of a man with a fixed idea, and looked more obstinate, more unintelligent than ever. To his daughter he had spoken only a few cold words, and his last bidding to her was 'Take care of the pothouse!' This treatment gave Miss Fouracres much pain, for she was a softhearted woman, and had never been anything but loyal and affectionate to her father all through his disastrous years. Moreover, she liked the Pig and Whistle, and could not bear to hear it spoken of disdainfully. Before the sound of the cart had died away she had to wipe moisture from her eyes, and at the moment when she was doing so Mr. Ruddiman came into the parlour.

'Has Mr. Fouracres gone?' asked the guest, with embarrassment.

'Just gone, sir,' replied the young woman, half turned away, and nervously fingering her chin.

'I shouldn't trouble about it if I were you, Miss Fouracres,' said Mr. Ruddiman in a tone of friendly encouragement. 'He'll soon be back, he'll soon be back, and you may depend upon it there'll be no harm done.'

'I hope so, sir, but I've an uneasy sort of feeling; I have indeed.'

'Don't you worry, Miss Fouracres. When the Prince has gone away he'll be better.'

Miss Fouracres stood for a moment with eyes cast down, then, looking gravely at Mr. Ruddiman, said in a sorrowful voice—

'He calls the Pig and Whistle a pothouse.'

'Ah, that was wrong of him!' protested the other, no less earnestly. 'A pothouse, indeed! Why, it's one of the nicest little inns you could find anywhere. I'm getting fond of the Pig and Whistle. A pothouse, indeed! No, I call that shameful.'

The listener's eyes shone with gratification.

'Of course we've got to remember,' she said more softly, 'that father has known very different things.'

'I don't care what he has known!' cried Mr. Ruddiman. 'I hope I may never have a worse home than the Pig and Whistle. And I only wish I could live here all the rest of my life, instead of going back to that beastly school!'

'Don't you like the school, Mr. Ruddiman?'

'Oh, I can't say I _dis_like it. But since I've been living here—well, it's no use thinking of impossibilities.'

Towards midday the pony and trap came back, driven by a lad from Woodbury, who had business in this direction. Miss Fouracres asked him to unharness and stable the pony, and whilst this was being done Mr. Ruddiman stood by, studiously observant. He had pleasure in every detail of the inn life. To-day he several times waited upon passing guests, and laughed exultantly at the perfection he was attaining. Miss Fouracres seemed hardly less pleased, but when alone she still wore an anxious look, and occasionally heaved a sigh of trouble.

Mr. Ruddiman, as usual, took an early supper, and soon after went up to his room. By ten o'clock the house was closed, and all through the night no sound disturbed the peace of the Pig and Whistle.

The morrow passed without news of Mr. Fouracres. On the morning after, just as Mr. Ruddiman was finishing his breakfast, alone in the parlour, he heard a loud cry of distress from the front part of the inn. Rushing out to see what was the matter, he found Miss Fouracres in agitated talk with a man on horseback.

'Ah, what did I say!' she cried at sight of the guest. 'Didn't I know something was going to happen? I must go at once—I must put in the pony—'

'I'll do that for you,' said Mr. Ruddiman. 'But what has happened?'

The horseman, a messenger from Woodbury, told a strange tale. Very early this morning, a gardener walking through the grounds at Woodbury Manor, and passing by a little lake or fishpond, saw the body of a man lying in the water, which at this point was not three feet in depth. He drew the corpse to the bank, and, in so doing, recognised his acquaintance, Mr. Fouracres, with whom he had spent an hour or two at a public-house in Woodbury on the evening before. How the landlord of the Pig and Whistle had come to this tragic end neither the gardener nor any one else in the neighbourhood could conjecture.

Mr. Ruddiman set to work at once on harnessing the pony, while Miss Fouracres, now quietly weeping, went to prepare herself for the journey. In a very few minutes the vehicle was ready at the door. The messenger had already ridden away.

'Can you drive yourself, Miss Fouracres?' asked Ruddiman, looking and speaking with genuine sympathy.

'Oh yes, sir. But I don't know what to do about the house. I may be away all day. And what about you, sir?'

'Leave me to look after myself, Miss Fouracres. And trust me to look after the house too, will you? You know I can do it. Will you trust me?'

'It's only that I'm ashamed, sir—'

'Not a bit of it. I'm very glad, indeed, to be useful; I assure you I am.'

'But your dinner, sir?'

'Why, there's cold meat. Don't you worry, Miss Fouracres. I'll look after myself, and the house too; see if I don't. Go at once, and keep your mind at ease on my account, pray do!'

'It's very good of you, sir, I'm sure it is. Oh, I knew something was going to happen! Didn't I say so?'

Mr. Ruddiman helped her into the trap; they shook hands silently, and Miss Fouracres drove away. Before the turn of the road she looked back. Ruddiman was still watching her; he waved his hand, and the young woman waved to him in reply.

Left alone, the under-master took off his coat and put on an apron, then addressed himself to the task of washing up his breakfast things. Afterwards he put his bedroom in order. About ten o'clock the first customer came in, and, as luck had it, the day proved a busier one than usual. No less than four cyclists stopped to make a meal. Mr. Ruddiman was able to supply them with cold beef and ham; moreover, he cooked eggs, he made tea—and all this with a skill and expedition which could hardly have been expected of him. None the less did he think constantly of Miss Fouracres. About five in the afternoon wheels sounded; aproned and in his shirt-sleeves, he ran to the door—as he had already done several times at the sound of a vehicle—and with great satisfaction saw the face of his hostess. She, too, though her eyes showed she had been weeping long, smiled with gladness; the next moment she exclaimed distressfully.

'Oh, sir! To think you've been here alone all day! And in an apron!'

'Don't think about me, Miss Fouracres. You look worn out, and no wonder. I'll get you some tea at once. Let the pony stand here a little; he's not so tired as you are. Come in and have some tea, Miss Fouracres.'

Mr. Ruddiman would not be denied; he waited upon his hostess, got her a very comfortable tea, and sat near her whilst she was enjoying it. Miss Fouracres' story of the day's events still left her father's death most mysterious. All that could be certainly known was that the landlord of the Pig and Whistle had drunk rather freely with his friend the gardener at an inn at Woodbury, and towards nine o'clock in the evening had gone out, as he said, for a stroll before bedtime. Why he entered the grounds of Woodbury Manor, and how he got into the pond there, no one could say. People talked of suicide, but Miss Fouracres would not entertain that suggestion. Of course there was to be an inquest, and one could only await the result of such evidence as might be forthcoming. During the day Miss Fouracres had telegraphed to the only relatives of whom she knew anything, two sisters of her father, who kept a shop in London. Possibly one of them might come to the funeral.

'Well,' said Mr. Ruddiman, in a comforting tone, 'all you have to do is to keep quiet. Don't trouble about anything. I'll look after the business.'

Miss Fouracres smiled at him through her tears.

'It's very good of you, sir, but you make me feel ashamed. What sort of a day have you had?'

'Splendid! Look here!'

He exhibited the day's receipts, a handful of cash, and, with delight decently subdued, gave an account of all that had happened.

'I like this business!' he exclaimed. 'Don't you trouble about anything.

Leave it all to me, Miss Fouracres.'

One of the London aunts came down, and passed several days at the Pig and Whistle. She was a dry, keen, elderly woman, chiefly interested in the question of her deceased brother's property, which proved to be insignificant enough. Meanwhile the inquest was held, and all the countryside talked of Mr. Fouracres, whose story, of course, was published in full detail by the newspapers. Once more opinions were divided as to whether the hapless landlord really had or had not entertained His Royal Highness. Plainly, Mr. Fouracres' presence in the grounds of Woodbury Manor was due to the fact that the Prince happened to be staying there. In a state of irresponsibility, partly to be explained by intoxication, partly by the impulse of his fixed idea, he must have gone rambling in the dark round the Manor, and there, by accident, have fallen into the water. No clearer hypothesis resulted from the legal inquiry, and with this all concerned had perforce to be satisfied. Mr. Fouracres was buried, and, on the day after the funeral, his sister returned to London. She showed no interest whatever in her niece, who, equally independent, asked neither counsel nor help.

Mr. Ruddiman and his hostess were alone together at the Pig and Whistle. The situation had a certain awkwardness. Familiars of the inn—country-folk of the immediate neighbourhood—of course began to comment on the state of things, joking among themselves about Mr. Ruddiman's activity behind the bar. The under-master himself was in an uneasy frame of mind. When Miss Fouracres' aunt had gone, he paced for an hour or two about the garden; the hostess was serving cyclists. At length the familiar voice called to him.

'Will you have your dinner, Mr. Ruddiman?'

He went in, and, before entering the parlour, stood looking at a cask of ale which had been tilted forward.

'We must tap the new cask,' he remarked.

'Yes, sir, I suppose we must,' replied his hostess, half absently.

'I'll do it at once. Some more cyclists might come.'

For the rest of the day they saw very little of each other. Mr. Ruddiman rambled musing. When he came at the usual hour to supper, guests were occupying the hostess. Having eaten, he went out to smoke his pipe in the garden, and lingered there—it being a fine, warm night—till after ten o'clock. Miss Fouracres' voice aroused him from a fit of abstraction.

'I've just locked up, sir.'

'Ah! Yes. It's late.'

They stood a few paces apart. Mr. Ruddiman had one hand in his waistcoat pocket, the other behind his back; Miss Fouracres was fingering her chin.

'I've been wondering,' said the under-master in a diffident voice, 'how you'll manage all alone, Miss Fouracres.'

'Well, sir,' was the equally diffident reply, 'I've been wondering too.'

'It won't be easy to manage the Pig and Whistle all alone.'

'I'm afraid not, sir.'

'Besides, you couldn't live here in absolute solitude. It wouldn't be safe.'

'I shouldn't quite like it, sir.'

'But I'm sure you wouldn't like to leave the Pig and Whistle, Miss

Fouracres?'

'I'd much rather stay, sir, if I could any way manage it.'

Mr. Ruddiman drew a step nearer.

'Do you know, Miss Fouracres, I've been thinking just the same. The fact is, I don't like the thought of leaving the Pig and Whistle; I don't like it at all. This life suits me. Could you'—he gave a little laugh—'engage me as your assistant, Miss Fouracres?'

'Oh, sir!'

'You couldn't?'

'How can you think of such a thing, sir.'

'Well, then, there's only one way out of the difficulty that I can see. Do you think—'

Had it not been dark Mr. Ruddiman would hardly have ventured to make the suggestion which fell from him in a whisper. Had it not been dark Miss Fouracres would assuredly have hesitated much longer before giving her definite reply. As it was, five minutes of conversation solved what had seemed a harder problem than any the under-master set to his class at Longmeadows, and when these two turned to enter the Pig and Whistle, they went hand in hand.

1

The same kind of limitations would have to be postulated in estimating the brothers De Goncourt, who, falling short of the first magnitude, have yet a fully recognised position upon the stellar atlas.

2

Three vols. 8vo, 1880 (Remington). It was noticed at some length in the Athenoeum of June 12th, in which the author's philosophic outlook is condemned as a dangerous compound of Schopenhauer, Comte, and Shelley. It is somewhat doubtful if he ever made more for a book than the £250 he got for New Grub Street. £200, we believe, was advanced on The Nether World, but this proved anything but a prosperous speculation from the publisher's point of view, and £150 was refused for Born in Exile.

3

Three vols., 1884, dedicated to M.C.R. In one volume 'revised,' 1895 (preface dated October 1895).

4

Who but Gissing could describe a heroine as exhibiting in her countenance 'habitual nourishment on good and plenteous food'?

5

Isabel Clarendon. By George Gissing. In two volumes, 1886 (Chapman and Hall). In reviewing this work the Academy expressed astonishment at the mature style of the writer—of whom it admitted it had not yet come across the name.

6

Of Gissing's early impressions, the best connected account, I think, is to be gleaned from the concluding chapters of The Whirlpool; but this may be reinforced (and to some extent corrected, or, here and there cancelled) by passages in Burn in Exile (vol. i.) and in Ryecroft. The material there supplied is confirmatory in the best sense of the detail contributed by Mr. Wells to the cancelled preface of Veranilda, touching the 'schoolboy, obsessed by a consuming passion for learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither from Wakefield at the age of thirteen—after the death of his father, who was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in his life. The tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, never departed from him; when he read aloud, particularly if it was poetry he read, his father returned in him. He could draw in those days with great skill and vigour—it will seem significant to many that he was particularly fascinated by Hogarth's work, and that he copied and imitated it; and his father's well-stocked library, and his father's encouragement, had quickened his imagination and given it its enduring bias for literary activity.' Like Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, Borrow, Dickens, Eliot, 'G.C.' is, half involuntarily, almost unconsciously autobiographic.

7

See a deeply interesting paper on Dickens by 'G.G.' in the New York Critic, Jan. 1902. Much of this is avowed autobiography.

8

Thyrza: A Novel (3 vols., 1887). In later life we are told that Gissing affected to despise this book as 'a piece of boyish idealism.' But he was always greatly pleased by any praise of this 'study of two sisters, where poverty for once is rainbow-tinted by love.' My impression is that it was written before Demos, but was longer in finding a publisher; it had to wait until the way was prepared by its coarser and more vigorous workfellow. A friend writes: 'I well remember the appearance of the MS. Gissing wrote then on thin foreign paper in a small, thin handwriting, without correction. It was before the days of typewriting, and the MS. of a three-volume novel was so compressed that one could literally put it in one's pocket without the slightest inconvenience.' The name is from Byron's Elegy on Thyrza.

9

I am thinking, in particular, of the old vielle-player's conversation in chap. xxiii. of John Inglesant; of the exquisite passage on old dance music—its inexpressible pathos—in chap. xxv.

10

See Emancipated, chaps. iv.-xii.; New Grub Street, chap, xxvii.; Ryecroft, Autumn xix.; the short, not superior, novel called Sleeping Fires, 1895, chap. i. 'An encounter on the Kerameikos'; The Albany, Christmas 1904, p. 27; and Monthly Review, vol. xvi. 'He went straight by sea to the land of his dreams—Italy. It was still happily before the enterprise of touring agencies had fobbed the idea of Italian travel of its last vestiges of magic. He spent as much time as he could afford about the Bay of Naples, and then came on with a rejoicing heart to Rome—Rome, whose topography had been with him since boyhood, beside whose stately history the confused tumult of the contemporary newspapers seemed to him no more than a noisy, unmeaning persecution of the mind. Afterwards he went to Athens.'

11

An impressive specimen of his eloquence was cited by me in an article in the Daily Mail Year Book (1906, p. 2). A riper study of a somewhat similar character is given in old Mr. Lashmar in Our Friend the Charlatan. (See his sermon on the blasphemy which would have us pretend that our civilisation obeys the spirit of Christianity, in chap, xviii.). For a criticism of Demos and Thyrza in juxtaposition with Besant's Children of Gibeon, see Miss Sichel on 'Philanthropic Novelists' (Murray's Magazine, iii. 506-518). Gissing saw deeper than to 'cease his music on a merry chord.'

12

Sometimes, however, as in The Whirlpool (1897) with a very significant change of intonation:—'And that History which he loved to read—what was it but the lurid record of woes unutterable! How could he find pleasure in keeping his eyes fixed on century after century of ever-repeated torment—war, pestilence, tyranny; the stake, the dungeon; tortures of infinite device, cruelties inconceivable?'—(p. 326.)

13

Dolman in National Review, vol. xxx.; cf. ibid., vol. xliv.

14

Here is a more fully prepared expression of the very essence of Biffen's artistic ideal.—By the Ionian Sea, chap. x.

15

See page 260.

16

With an exhibition gained when he was not yet fifteen.

17

Followed in 1897 by The Whirlpool (see p. xvi), and in 1899 and 1903 by two books containing a like infusion of autobiographical experience, The Crown of Life, technically admirable in chosen passages, but sadly lacking in the freshness of first-hand, and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, one of the rightest and ripest of all his productions.

18

'I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus. I have walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together without even a thought of saving my legs or my time, by paying for waftage. Being poor as poor can be, there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one of them.'—Ryecroft. For earlier scenes see Monthly Review, xvi., and Owens College Union Mag., Jan. 1904, pp. 80-81.

19

'He knew the narrowly religious, the mental barrenness of the poor dissenters, the people of the slums that he observed so carefully, and many of those on the borders of the Bohemia of which he at least was an initiate, and he was soaked and stained, as he might himself have said, with the dull drabs of the lower middle class that he hated. But of those above he knew little…. He did not know the upper middle classes, which are as difficult every whit as those beneath them, and take as much time and labour and experience and observation to learn.'—'The Exile of George Gissing,' Albany, Christmas 1904. In later life he lost sympathy with the 'nether world.' Asked to write a magazine article on a typical 'workman's budget,' he wrote that he no longer took an interest in the 'condition of the poor question.'

20

The Odd Women (1893, new edition, 1894) is a rather sordid and depressing survey of the life-histories of certain orphaned daughters of a typical Gissing doctor—grave, benign, amiably diffident, terribly afraid of life. 'From the contact of coarse actualities his nature shrank.' After his death one daughter, a fancy-goods shop assistant (no wages), is carried off by consumption; a second drowns herself in a bath at a charitable institution; another takes to drink; and the portraits of the survivors, their petty, incurable maladies, their utter uselessness, their round shoulders and 'very short legs,' pimples, and scraggy necks—are as implacable and unsparing as a Maupassant could wish. From the deplorable insight with which he describes the nerveless, underfed, compulsory optimism of these poor in spirit and poor in hope Gissing might almost have been an 'odd woman' himself. In this book and The Paying Guest (1895) he seemed to take a savage delight in depicting the small, stiff, isolated, costly, unsatisfied pretentiousness and plentiful lack of imagination which cripples suburbia so cruelly.—See Saturday Review, 13 Apr. 1896; and see also ib., 19 Jan. 1895.

21

The whirlpool in which people just nod or shout to each other as they spin round and round. The heroine tries to escape, but is drawn back again and again, and nearly submerges her whole environment by her wild clutches. Satire is lavished upon misdirected education (28), the sluttishness of London landladies, self-adoring Art on a pedestal (256), the delegation of children to underlings, sham religiosity (229), the pampered conscience of a diffident student, and the mensonge of modern woman (300), typified by the ruddled cast-off of Redgrave, who plays first, in her shrivelled paint, as procuress, and then, in her naked hideousness, as blackmailer.

22

A revised edition (the date of Dickens's birth is wrongly given in the first) was issued in 1902, with topographical illustrations by F.G. Kitton. Gissing's introduction to Nickleby for the Rochester edition appeared in 1900, and his abridgement of Forster's Life (an excellent piece of work) in 1903 [1902]. The first collection of short stories, twenty-nine in number, entitled Human Odds and Ends, was published in 1898. It is justly described by the writer of the most interesting 'Recollections of George Gissing' in the Gentleman's Magazine, February 1906, as 'that very remarkable collection.'

23

It also contains one of the most beautiful descriptions ever penned of the visit of a tired town-dweller to a modest rural home, with all its suggestion of trim gardening, fresh country scents, indigenous food, and homely simplicity.—Will Warburton, chap. ix.

24

'I love and honour even the least of English landscape painters.'—Ryecroft.

25

'But what with the parsons and clerks and school-people and serious tea-parties, the merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs—upon my carcass, they have!'—Far from the Madding Crowd.

26

In a young lady's album I unexpectedly came across the line from Maud, 'Be mine a philosopher's life in the quiet woodland ways,' with the signature, following the quotation marks, 'George Gissing.' The borrowed aspiration was transparently sincere. 'Tennyson he worshipped' (see Odd Women, chap. i.). The contemporary novelist he liked most was Alphonse Daudet.