DOBLE DREWE

Doble Drewe was plumber, glazier, paperhanger, and house-painter; chiefly plumber, but also a most excellent house-painter.

Whatever Doble undertook in his profession he executed in the very best manner. If any fault appeared, it was in the quality of the material used, not in his use of it; and, consciously, he never would employ for his work any material but what he believed to be the very best. He spared himself no pains, he cut no time short over his work. The work he undertook, he undertook to do as well as it was possible for him to execute it, and I really believe he had not his superior in his own line in England, and if not in England then certainly not in Europe, and if not in Europe then—it goes without saying—not in the round world.

But he took, it must be conceded, a very long time over his task. Most persons who employed him lost patience because he was so slow. But slow he was not when one considered the quality of his workmanship. He scamped nothing. When he painted even a railing, he took infinite pains to holystone the wood till he had cleaned off every particle of old paint and had got the wood perfectly smooth. And each coat of paint was laid on with the greatest nicety. There was a carved oak table that once stood in our drawing-room. The fashion had set in for satin-wood, so the room was done up, doors, cabinets, tables, all to look like satin-wood. And all was done by Doble Drewe.

Most lovely make-believe satin-wood he produced. That was before the days of the “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” when Mr. Ruskin turned his bull’s-eye on shams, and showed that they were morally wrong. At the period of which I write everything must be a sham or it was not fashionable. Wood was painted to look like marble, and cement to imitate wood.

Well—about this carved table.

The other day I sent it to a furniture-dealer to remove the paint and develop the oak.

After a while it returned to me, and with it came the bill.

“Really, sir,” said the dealer, “I am ashamed at having asked so much, but it is incredible what labour it has taken my men to clean that table. Never saw nothing like it before. The paint simply wouldn’t come off. It was like taking the skin off a living man.”

“Ah!” said I, “Doble Drewe’s work.”

But if Doble was slow over his tasks, he was slower in sending in his bills. Why he did not make them out and transmit them to his customers till three, four, even six years had elapsed, I cannot tell, but it is a fact. And this lost him customers who could pay, because they did not relish having to give out money over items every one of which had passed from their memories. The only customers he gained were those thriftless creatures who did not want to pay there and then, and who hoped they might be more flush of money in a few years’ time than they were in the present. And some of his customers died, others became bankrupt, or left the neighbourhood without leaving their addresses, before Doble Drewe’s bills were ready. I know that mine came in for work done for my father five years after my father was dead, and I had thought all had been settled, probate paid, with deductions for bills, and Doble’s, of course, not deducted because I did not know it was due.

Now although scrupulously conscientious over his plumbing and glazing, his paper-hanging and painting, and though whilst on his work he had all his faculties engaged upon it, yet Doble had a soul for something very much above lead and paint and putty.

I found it out one day in this wise.

My mother had a marvellously lovely voice, and she was sitting in the drawing-room that had been satin-wooded, at the piano playing and singing, whilst Drewe was in the hall labouring at painting the panels to look like pollard willow, stippling, brushing, graining, putting in plenty of knots where no knots really were, and running the grain across the direction where its course by nature lay.

I happened to be in another part of the hall to that where was the painter on his knees engaged at his work. He did not know that I was there—so quiet was I, engaged on Captain Maryatt’s “Snarley Yow, or the Dog Fiend.”

If I remember aright my mother was singing Haynes Bayley’s “We met, ’twas in a crowd.”

It was not a song for a soprano or for a woman, and though she went through with it, seemed unsatisfied, put the book away and was for a while engaged in finding another piece.

I thought I heard a sound from the corner where the painter was. I looked up from “Snarley Yow,” but seeing nothing particular, looked again at the entrancing book.

Then my mother broke out in the song from the “Creation,” “With verdure clad.”

Before she had got half-way through I was sure that I heard something from Doble. It was a sob.

I stood up—but he put back his hand to stay me as I approached.

I waited till my mother’s singing and the chords of the piano had ceased to vibrate, and then I said to him:

“Are you unwell, Mr. Drewe? Is there anything I can get for you?”

He had a choke in his voice, and I saw as he turned that his cheeks were wet with tears.

“Excuse me, young gentleman,” said he. “Don’t mind me. I cannot help it. Indeed, indeed, I cannot refrain. When I hear music, good, beautiful music, it makes me cry like a woman—like a woman. You’ll excuse me. Go on with your book and don’t mind me.”

I had many a talk with the plumber after this, and I found that it was so with him. When he heard good music he passed into a transport, an ecstasy. But then, how seldom it was that he did hear and could hear good music! He lived in a little village some ten miles from a town, and that a sleepy, stagnant country town, and no railway within thirty miles.

Nowadays we have in our little centres all over England good choral societies, and concerts are given not only by amateurs, that may sing well, but often only think that they do so, but also by touring professionals.

It was not so when I was a boy. Then there were no such things as choral unions and concerts, out of the capital of the county, that was accessible only by coach.

Then locomotion was not easy; and the utmost length of a villager’s journey was to the market town and that only on a market day.

At that time the parish church indeed had its orchestra and its choir, but oh! what appalling, agonising productions were the concerted pieces there produced.

Poor Doble Drewe suffered acutely when an instrument was out of tune, and a piece played out of time; and when were all the instruments in the west gallery either in tune or in time the one with the other?

Doble’s sole ambition was to obtain a piano, and he did purchase one out of the savings of many years, to discover that he was powerless to play it, that his ardent musical soul could not relax his stiff fingers and enable them to play even a simple piece. He had not learned as a boy, and now it was too late. “Now look you here,” said Doble. “This is a terrible disappointment to me, but I’ll not be beat. I’ll have good music in my house somehow. I’ll marry a wife, and get a little boy or girl; it don’t matter which, and I’ll have that there child taught so soon as ever it has the sense to know its notes; and when I’m an old man I’ll just sit by the fire and listen, and my lad or my little maid shall play to me by the hour. I’ll have Handel, and Haydn, and Bishop, and Mozart. Ah! them will be times worth living for. I’ll go about it at once.”

And he did. He married a young woman, not because she could play a piano, for at that period there were none to be had in his walk of life who could finger an instrument, but with the prospect of becoming a parent of one who could be educated into a skilful player.

“You see,” said he, “there is the piano. All it wants is some one to play on it. It is only a matter of waiting some fifteen or eighteen years, and then—then my time of enjoyment will have come. Then—then I shall have music.”

But no. Again he encountered disappointment. No child was given to him, and the wife he had selected, instead of producing harmony in the home, was a fruitful source of discord. She had a tongue and she had a temper, and she was no idealist, and could not abide just those two things which made Doble what he was—a painstaking, scrupulous workman, and withal a dreamer.

“Why, Doble,” she would say, “what’s the good of your doing your jobs so slow and so fine? There’s other chaps get twice the work you do by just slurring along.”

“I cannot do other. It would go against my conscience.”

“And as to your dratted music. You ain’t got none, and you can’t have none, so just lump it and be joyful.”

To that he made no reply. No answer he could have made would have been comprehensible by her.

So time went on.

Doble’s back became bent. His look became more abstracted. His was an earnest face, with a questioning, craving, seeking look upon it.

Then came a chance.

In the cathedral city the “Messiah” was to be performed, and the choir of the minster were to take part, also sundry amateurs, and Formes and Albani were to sing.

I gave myself a treat. I went up, and took the plumber with me.

I do not think that Drewe had any conception of what massive chorus singing could be, or what cultured voices could effect in solos. Remember, he never had heard good music in his own village; only direful failures to achieve something that was supposed to be music. His only—I really believe his only previous acquaintance with good singing was his hearing my mother sing.

As to describing how Doble looked through that concert, I cannot. He was as one not himself, rigid, rapt, not of this earth, with the great tears rolling down his thin, worn cheeks; he sat with his hands folded between his knees and never moved—no more than had he been of stone.

Nor did Doble speak much after it; he went back to his lodging as in a dream.

And as we returned by coach next day he was reticent. I knew what was passing within the man, and did not tease him with questions, but as he left the coach at his door, he squeezed my hand and said: “Sir, I shall live on that all the rest of my days.”

In after years I have often pondered over Doble. It has seemed to me one of those unfathomable mysteries of life that there should be in a poor little country village a man created by God, endowed by God with high-strung musical faculties, yet absolutely incapacitated by position and circumstances for making any use of his great gift, for deriving any enjoyment from it. Why was not Doble placed somewhere else? Why was Doble given a faculty he could not use?

Many years passed, and I was cast into a far distant portion of England, yet I may say that this problem continually troubled me.

Once I came across a farmer’s wife in a low and peculiarly ugly portion of the East coast of England, and she had the same sort of craving soul after beautiful scenery. “I feel,” she said to me once, “as though I would like to look on the Alps—and die.”

It is the same throughout the world of men. It must have been so through countless ages. There must have been Mozarts and Purcells in the ages that were before musical instruments were made, and the laws of harmony laid down and concerted music was made possible. Hundreds and thousands of Doble Drewes over all the earth and in all time. A mystery! A perplexing problem I could not solve. It haunted me. It distressed me.

A few years ago I was at my old home, and I was talking to the curate of the parish in which Doble Drewe had lived.

“So,” said I, “poor old Drewe is dead.”

“Yes, and buried.”

“I wish——”

“You were not in this neighbourhood then?”

“No. Tell me something about the old fellow.”

“I really do not think I have anything to tell.”

“Was his wife a little less nagging as he grew older and faded away?”

He shook his head. “Tongues grow sharper the more they are used.”

“And—at the last? Had he much pain?”

“I was with him when he died. The woman was quiet then. He lay for some hours as though insensible, and I thought the end might be at any moment. All at once he moved, held up his hand, assumed a listening attitude, a wonderful light and smile broke out over his face; he seemed to be hearkening attentively. Then he said, ‘Now,’ laid his head on the pillow, and was dead.”

That night, after the curate was gone, I rocked in my chair, musing, looking into the fire. I muttered, “Poor old Doble!” then after a pause, said, “Happy Doble!” and then, “Now I also understand.”

Thereupon I took down a little book I had of Dr. Alexander’s poems, and read: