Exactly--because over that very little greengrocer's shop in Fetter Lane--the two windows above the shop itself--was where he lived.
For a moment she gazed at him in astonishment; then she stared out into the traffic before her. Back through her mind raced the sensations she had experienced that day when she had lunched with him. The secrecy, the novelty, the stuffy little eating-house, it had all seemed very romantic then. The tablecloth was not as clean as it might be, but the high-backed seats had been there for nearly two hundred years. One thing weighed with another. The waiter was familiar; but, as John had explained to her, the waiters knew everybody, and you might feel as much annoyed at their familiarity as you had reason to at the age of the poll-parrot and the remarks that he made about the cooking. They all combined to make Wrigglesworth's--Wrigglesworth's; and she had taken it for granted in the halo of romance. But to live there! To sleep at night within sight and sound of all the things which her unaccustomed eyes and cars had seen and heard! She suddenly remembered the type of people she had seen coming in and out of the doorways; then she looked back at John.
"Then you're very poor?" she said gently.
"If you mean I haven't a lot of money," he said.
"Yes."
"Then poor is the word."
He sat and watched her in silence. She was thinking very fast. He could see the thoughts, as you see cloud shadows creeping across water--passing through her eyes. Even now, he knew that she would understand in the face of all upbringing, all hereditary ideas. But he waited for her to speak again. The moment was hers. He trusted her to make the best of it.
"Why didn't you ask me to come and see your rooms after we'd had lunch at Wrigglesworth's?" she said presently and, expecting simplicity, counting upon understanding, even he was surprised.
"Ask you there? To those rooms? Over the little greengrocer's shop?
Up those uncarpeted wooden stairs?"
And then they found themselves under the portico of the Opera House; in another moment in the crush of people in the vestibule; then making their way round the cheaply-papered boxes along the ugly little passages to the stage-box on the third tier.
The attendant threw open the door. Like children, who have been allowed down to the drawing-room after dinner, they walked in. And it was all very wonderful, the sky of brilliant lights and the sea of human beings below them. It was real romance to be perched away up in a little box in the great wall--a little box which shut them in so safely and so far away from all those people to whom they were so near. Her heart was beating with the sense of anticipation and fear for the fruit which their hands had stolen. For the first ten minutes, she would scarcely have been surprised had the door of the box opened behind them and her mother appeared in a vision of wrath and justice. Some things seem too good to be true, too wonderful to last, too much to have hoped for. And Romance is just that quality of real life which happens to be full of them.
From the moment that the curtain rose upon the life of these four happy-go-lucky Bohemians, to the moment when it fell as Rudolfo and Mimi set off to the _cafe_, these two sat in their third-tier box like mice in a cage, never moving a finger, never stirring an eye. Only John's nostrils quivered and once or twice there passed a ripple down Jill's throat.
At last fell the curtain, one moment of stillness to follow and, shattering that stillness then into a thousand little pieces, the storm of the clapping of hands.
Music is a drug, a subtle potion of sound made liquid, which one drinks without knowing what strange effect it may or may not have upon the blood. To some it is harmless, ineffectual, passing as quietly through the veins as a draught of cool spring water; to others it is wine, nocuous and sweet, bringing visions to the senses and pulses to the heart, burning the lips of men to love and the eyes of women to submission. To others again, it is a narcotic, a draught bringing the sleep that is drugged with the wildest and most impossible of dreams.
But some there are, who by this philtre are imbued with all the knowledge of the good, are stirred to the desire to reach forward just that hand's stretch which in such a moment but separates the divine in the human from the things which are infinite.
This was the power that music had upon John.
While the applause was still vibrating through the house, while the curtain was still rising and falling to the repeated appearances of the players, he slipped his hand into his pocket, took something quickly out, and when she turned after the final curtain fall, Jill beheld, standing upon the velvet railing of the box, a little man all in brass, with one hand resting aristocratically upon his hip and the other stretched out as though to take her own.
Surprise and question filled her eyes. She looked up at John. She looked back at the little brass man, and the little brass man looked back at her. It may not have been that he raised his hat; but he had all the appearance of having just done so.
"Did you put that there?" she asked.
John nodded. She picked him up, and once her fingers had touched him, the spell of his dignity was cast.
"What is he? Where did you get him? What does he mean?" One question fell fast upon another.
"He's my little brass man," said John. "He's an old seal, over a hundred years old----" And he told her the whole story.
When he had finished, the curtain rose once more--outside the _Cafe_ Momus with the babel of children and the hum and laughter of a crowd that only a city southeast of the Thames can know or understand.
Through all the act, Jill sat with the little brass man standing boldly beside her. When it was over, she turned to him again.
"Aren't you very miserable when you have to--to part with him?" she asked.
"Very.--He comes back as soon as possible. But I've made a resolve."
"What's that?"
"I'm going to put him out of reach of the indignity. He's never going to the chapel of unredemption any more."
"What are you going to do?"
"Give him to you. You are the only person I know of, who has the gift of understanding poverty."
"To me?" Instinctively her fingers tightened round him. "To me?" she repeated.
He smiled and bent his head. "He seals our friendship," said he.
This was his way of telling her that he knew she understood. The perfect nonsense of the gift--a figure in brass that cost seven'
shillings and had been pledged and redeemed for six, times out of number--this had little or nothing to do with it. Everything in this world is nonsense; the whole of life is a plethora of ludicrous absurdities, one more fanciful than another. The setting upon the head of a man a fantastic piece of metal and calling in a loud voice that he is king--the holding aloft of another piece of metal, crossed in shape, studded with precious stones, and exhorting those who behold it to fall upon their knees--the placing on the finger of a little circular band--of metal too--and thereby binding irrevocably the lives and freedom of two living beings in an indissoluble bondage, all these things are nonsense, childish, inconsequent nonsense, but for their symbolism and the inner meaning that they hold.
The crown is nothing, the cross is nothing, the ring is nothing, too. A goldsmith, a silversmith, a worker in brass, these men can turn them out under the hammer or upon the lathe; they can scatter the earth with them and have done so. From the crown in finest gold and rarest jewels to the crown in paper gilt, the difference can only be in value, not in truth. From the great cross in Westminster Cathedral to the little nickel toy that hangs from the cheapest of rosary beads, the difference is only the same. From the massive ring that the Pope must wear to the tinsel thing that the cracker hides in its gaudy wrappings at Christmas-time, the difference is just the same. Each would serve the other's purpose. Each would mean nothing but nonsense and empty foolishness except to the eyes which behold the symbolism that they bear.
Yet they, because of their meanings, dominate the world. Little pieces of metal of the earth's reluctant yield--for the highest symbolism always takes form in metal--they govern and command with a despotism that is all part of the chaos of nonsense in which we live.
Only one form of metal there is, which is a meaning in itself; before which, without nonsense and without symbolism, a man must bow his head--the sword. The only thing in this world of ours in which nonsense plays no part; the only thing in this world of ours which needs no symbolism to give it power. Yet in times of peace, it lies idly in the scabbard and there are few to bring it reverence.
For the present, nonsense must content us then. The greatest intellects must admit that it is still in the nature of them to sprawl upon the floor of the nursery, making belief with crowns, with crosses and with rings--making belief that in these fanciful toys lies all the vast business of life.
Until we learn the whole riddle of it all, the highest profession will be that of the nonsense-maker. The man who can beat out of metal some symbolical form, earns the thankfulness of a complete world of children.
For with baubles such as these, it is in the everlasting nature of us to play, until the hours slip by and the summons comes for sleep.
So played the two--children in a world of children--in their stage-box on the third tier. She knew well what the gift of the little brass man must mean--the _Chevalier d'honneur_. John might have sworn a thousand times that he knew the great power of her understanding; yet such is the nature of the child, that in this little symbol of brass--as much a nonsense thing as any symbol of its kind--she understood far clearer the inner meaning of that word friendship.
"Will you accept him?" said John gently.
She looked back in his eyes.
"On one condition."
"What is that?"
"That if ever we cease to be friends, he must be returned to you."
CHAPTER XIX
THE MR. CHESTERTON
It was always a strain when July came round, for John to amass those seventeen odd pounds for the journey to Venice. But it was a greater strain when, having amassed it, he had some days before him in which to walk about the streets before he departed--it was a greater strain, then, not to spend it. For money, to those who have none, is merely water and it percolates through the toughest pigskin purse, finds it way somehow or other into the pocket and, once there, is in a sieve with as broad a mesh as you could need to find.
It was always in these few days before his yearly exodus, that John ran across the things that one most desires to buy. Shop-keepers had a bad habit of placing their most alluring bargains in the very fore-front of the window. Everything, in fact, seemed cheaper in July, and seventeen pounds was a sum which had all the appearance of being so immense, that the detraction of thirty shillings from the hoard would make but little material difference to the bulk of it.