Chapter 23: The Last Home

The summer passed in heavy, brooding heat; the autumn brought long days of diminished sunshine; and at last the winter came, with rain and fog. London looked its worst, dull, drab, dishevelled, and nowhere was its grim squalor more distressing than in Tottenham.

A district of mean streets, formless and chaotic, sprawling aimlessly in a sea of mud; houses gray and dingy, exuding dirt; other houses, new and cheaply built, already overtaken by decay, huddled in shivering wretchedness along roads deep in mire; churches with the paint peeling from their doors; paltry ill-stocked shops visibly struggling for existence; a few smoke-stained trees; a smoke-stained sky; and tribes of men and women moving to and fro dejectedly, with backs hunched against the driving rain, or faces showing pallid in the fog, —such is Tottenham. It is a district without grace, without charm, with no interruption in its uniformity of dullness. The disparities caused by social rank, which elsewhere give some semblance of external variety, are not found here. Poverty sees itself reduplicated at every turn; it looks into its own face, and sees no other. A district no man chooses; into which he may be thrust by dire misfortune, in which he may dwell with resentment, with a heart swollen with regret, with a mind embittered; but which excites in him no respect and no affection. London, with its glories and adventures, shines afar; it shines splendid and contemptuous. For here there are no adventures; memories, but no prospects; life without ardour; struggle without hope; toil without release.

It was in this district that Masterman had chosen to live. Its tragic dreariness presented a subtle correspondence with his own temper. Having sought wealth for so many years with a fierce intensity of passion, he now embraced poverty with an equal ardour. The world had humiliated him, and, as if to show how little he cared for the world’s verdict, he added to his humiliation features which the world had not intended. He hungered for renunciation, not as saints have hungered, but with the bravado of a broken heart. He would show himself unsubduable; that was his main thought. And in what more striking way could he do this than by a complete indifference to the world’s opinion, a voluntary descent into indignity? To toil in harsh labours, to eat poor food, to live in the meanest way, without complaint, without visible resentment, —this was his challenge to the world, by which he declared his complete contempt for the world’s judgment and opinion.

This had been his sole motive for rejecting the proffered generosity of Bundy. And there were others beside Bundy, the friends and acquaintances of his prosperity, who would gladly have given him a helping hand. But, since he could not wholly recover his old position, he scorned a partial reclamation. To move before the eyes of these former friends shorn of his power, narrowed, limited, perhaps pitied, was a thing impossible. Better far to leave the arena for ever, and leave it with a proud disdain. Exile was less painful than toleration. The exile may at least keep his pride; but what pride is possible to the broken supernumerary who “lags superfluous on the stage”?

“No,” he said, when Bundy pressed him to accept his help, “I can’t do it. I know you mean it kindly; but I can’t.”

“But why not?”

“You wouldn’t understand if I told you.”

“I understand you’re the most obstinate man I ever met,” said Bundy, with a touch of indignant heat.

“Obstinate? Well, p’raps so. We’ll let it go at that. Yes, I’m obstinate.”

And his smile was so grim and tragic that Bundy said no more.

It was one of the curious features of his situation that the house he chose to live in at Tottenham was a triumph of architectural mendacity; the same kind of house, in fact, as those with which he himself had disfigured London, but some grades lower than his own flimsiest performances. The doors were badly hung and would not close; the wainscots, fashioned of green wood, were already shrunken; the window frames rattled and let in the cold air; the chimneys smoked; the ceiling plaster was already in process of disintegration; there was nothing in the house that was not eloquent of fraud. Perhaps he had been moved by the spirit of irony in the selection of such a house as his final habitation. He might have lived elsewhere; but nowhere else could he have gratified his perversity with such completeness. Grimes employed him; well, let him live in one of Grimes’s houses too; in doing so he anticipated the world’s laughter by laughing himself.

“He’s a holy terror, is Grimes,” he would remark. “I thought I knew how to build a thirty-pound house myself pretty well; but Grimes beats me hands down. He can give me points every time.”

And then he would recapitulate with sardonic skill all the building tricks of which Grimes had been guilty, specifying each with bitter humour.

“I did sometimes use sand in my mortar; but Grimes uses mud—mere road mud at that. And I did put down drains of some sort; but Grimes beats me there—he don’t appear to have heard of drains. And his party-walls, holy Moses! I believe if I spat at them they’d fall down.”

When Arthur came home in the evening, he would meet him at the door with ironic warnings.

“Here, mind you shut that door quietly. If you bang it, it’s my belief the whole gimcrack will be about your ears. And be careful you take your boots off before you go upstairs. Those stairs weren’t meant for boots. And, whatever you do, don’t you be leaning against the walls. They kind o’ shake every time a fly walks over them. I guess it wouldn’t need much of a Samson to pull them down. He wouldn’t need to touch ‘em; I reckon a sneeze would do the trick.”

“Father, I can’t bear to see you so bitter.”

“Bitter? Oh no, I’m not bitter. I’m amused, that’s all.”

“I wish you wouldn’t live here, father. There’s no need. Let me find another house. Between us, we’ve money enough.”

“Well, Arthur, you see I kind of like living here. It’s exciting. You never know what’s going to happen. And, besides, it’s instructive. I’m studying the methods of my friend Grimes, in case I should want to start again presently as a contractor. I’m learning every day. There’s more than meets the eye in this contracting business; and, since I’ve worked for Grimes, I begin to think I never knew a thing about it.”