Fellow Passenger

by Geoffrey Household

  I sat in the Seaman’s Home office, and had another meal and some more tea while waiting for an interpreter. A grey soul in a grey middle age I thought him when he arrived; but as soon as he started to speak Spanish he began to light up, by degrees, like a slow electric fire—first his mouth, then his eyes and then his hands. He was an excellent fellow who had passed fifteen years of his life in the Argentine. The mere use of the language carried him back to the uninhibited generosity of life and manners which he had loved. Respectable Erith, its dirty bricks, its pubs and its furtive privacies were not, for this precious moment of his, realities.

  He spotted my accent at once as South American, not Spanish, and I accounted for that by saying I had spent years in Venezuela. I had to go into details of the Cabo Culebra and gave her a cargo of grapes and melons from Valencia. It seemed to me a bit early in the season for both, but I was already committed to fruit. She was far more likely to have had sherry in her holds. As the slightest investigation would show that there had not been any Cabo Culebra at all in the Port of London, it didn’t matter—beyond reminding me that I had to be clear of Erith before any enquiries could be made.

  The Seamen’s Home fellow began to be a little impatient at the length and good humour of our conversation, especially as much of its substance, when sketchily translated to him, had nothing to do with the Cabo Culebra and consisted of joyous reminiscences. He was anxious to call in the police. The Rochester Star, being only a Thames Estuary coaster, had known little and cared less about the clearing of aliens. That formality had to be completed, even if the alien had been roosting on a buoy.

  My genial interpreter explained to me that we would now visit the police. I expressed the utmost willingness, but on the way to the station I begged him with tears in my eyes to telephone the Spanish Consulate and ask them to cable my wife that I was alive in case the Cabo Culebra had already wirelessed news of the accident. It was a dirty trick to play on him, but I could not help it. I gave him my wife’s name and address. I spread myself upon her misery and beauty, describing in fact and with enthusiasm my lovely Dr Cornelia.

  We stopped at a post office. I had a feeling that it was going to be pretty difficult to get any sense out of the Spanish Consulate about a non-existent ship at nine-thirty in the morning when somebody reasonably inefficient would be there, and consuls and vice-consuls probably would not.

  I watched my poor friend—ah, could I but entertain him in Ecuador!—sweating in the telephone box, and then edged out of the post office and walked to the railway station at a pace which any innocent Spaniard would have considered undignified. After a quick glance at the time-tables, I found that in four minutes there would be a train to London Bridge. I bought a ticket, asking for it in broken English. That was rather more than I was supposed to know; but if I were traced to the station, as within an hour I certainly should be, my little bit of English was not enough to arouse suspicion.

  Once in the train, with time to think of long-term tactics, the difficulties overwhelmed me. The Spanish seaman, of no particular importance to anybody, could easily vanish. But Howard-Wolferstan could not. As soon as it was obvious that they were one and the same—which it would be, when those much delayed passengers told their story—the police and MI5 would be after me in full force. The dreaded MI5 I should call them—though they seem to me to be as subject to human error as the rest of us.

  Clothes were the trouble. I was too conspicious a figure. It was safe to assume that whatever I bought, I could be traced through the place where I bought it. When a description of me was out, the second-hand clothes dealer would be round at the nearest police station in five minutes.

  I left the train at Greenwich, and by hanging about for a bit in the lavatory managed to leave the station without surrendering my ticket. In that way I might gain an hour while the pursuit bothered the staff at London Bridge. In Greenwich I counted the colours of the suits I saw on the streets, taking only men of what one might call pronounced middle-class, ranging, say, from foremen to commercial travellers. I found that blue came first—that may have been peculiar to a seaport—with greys and browns following closely; and there were a large number of well-worn suits which one man would describe as a sort of grey, and another as a sort of brown. They were colourless as a piece of wet driftwood. That, then, was to be my choice.

  I came on a second-hand dealer in a back street, and bought myself a suit and hat for a couple of pounds. The suit was majority colour and would look respectable for a day or two until the worn cloth ceased to hold the shape ironed into it by the cleaners. I could not imitate cockney dialect with any real facility, and I feared I would attract attention if I spoke cultured English. So again I used a foreign accent.

  With my new clothes in a brown paper parcel, I kept to the poorer streets until I came to a chemist’s shop. There I bought shaving kit, a bandage and a roll of cotton wool. So to a public lavatory—whence I emerged as a decent citizen who had had a nasty accident to one side of his face. I quietly dropped my old clothes into the ebbing tide. The Spanish seaman had vanished, and Howard-Wolferstan had come back to life.

  The bandage, however, was a very weak disguise, and I knew only too well that I must change my appearance again in a matter of hours. I took a bus into London, settled myself down with a paper in the gardens of the Tower—it never occurred to me that I was important enough to become a lodger—and considered the next move.

  I had to count that the purchase of clothes and bandage would be traced by the police within a few hours of the identification of the Spanish seaman, and that, if I remained as I was, I should be in a cell by midnight; but without the bandage I was plainly Howard-Wolferstan, whose photographs would be all over the morning papers. With the whole country on the look-out for a man of my build and of dark, un-English complexion, life was going to be hell not only for me but for every Arab, Spaniard or Italian who happened to find himself in a town where he was not known. I could not take a train, buy, eat or appear in public at all. Even if I could find a hide-out I had no hope of reaching it.

  My appearance had to be changed, but there was no way of turning myself into a fair or medium Englishman. Peroxide? It would deal only with my hair, and make me even more conspicuous. I envied regular criminals with a back room in which to go to ground, and escaped prisoners-of-war with an organization to help them. Then stay in my natural colours and account for my Latin face by some disguise? A turban, an Arab head-dress, a mask—any of them might enable me, with sufficient impudence, to get clear. But the present nameless citizen with a bandage over half his face could not enter a shop to buy comic hats, nor could Howard-Wolferstan.

  Despairing, I wandered east along Wapping High Street, although I had had quite enough of ships and docks. I doubt if any fixed plan at all was in my mind. I was drawn vaguely towards the half-way house of dark faces, of lascar seamen and Goanese stewards, towards the only real southern frontier which England possessed. Equally vaguely I was drawn to the ships for South America in spite of knowing that every stowaway would be doubly suspect. All the while I kept my eyes open for any possibility. Much as I distrust violence as the last refuge of the brainless, it would not have been safe for anyone wearing an outlandish oriental costume to meet me in an empty lane.

  I stopped to look at a shop entrance and window. Half ship-chandler’s and half ironmonger’s it was, full of brushes and gear for odd trades. There were new and second-hand chimney-sweeping brushes. I stared at them without remembering what they were for. And then the vision came to me of the local sweep pedalling along on his bicycle with his bundle of brushes over the handlebars.

  To find a bicycle shop was the first and—as it turned out—the longest job. At last I hit one, off the Whitechapel Road, stocked with old bicycles from the reconditioned to the cheap and rusty. Making a careful note of the street, I turned back towards the river to discover a reasonably private heap of coal. I did not have to go far.
Near Shadwell station was a coal-merchant’s yard. It was the lunch hour, and there was no one about except a watchman eating sandwiches in his office. I sneaked past him and dived into a coal-heap as eagerly as a chilly man into a hot bath. In a moment my hands and face were black with coal dust, and my suit moderately dirty. Only moderately. I assumed that a sweep would wear overalls at work.

  So back to the bicycle shop, now without the bandage which I had left hidden under the coal. I did not yet look my part, judging by the grins and remarks of the passers-by: ‘What ’appened, myte?’ ‘Must a emptied the truck over ’im!’ ‘Did yer find the chap what pushed yer, myte?’ and so on. It was evident that in the absence of brushes the public took my face to be blackened by coal dust, as indeed it was, not soot.

  The proprietor of the bicycle shop said:

  ‘Gawd, you are in a mess, ain’t yer?’

  That entitled me to be short with him. I could trust my cockney dialect enough to answer:

  ‘Never seed a sweep before?’

  After that, with grunts and monosyllables, I made him parade his bicycles for me. I bought one which he had not had time to enamel and renovate. It worked, and it had two wheels and a brake; that was all you could say for it. It cost four pounds.

  On my disreputable bicycle I went to the ironmonger’s, keeping to my part of an uncommunicative man in a filthy temper. I made a play of examining his stand of second-hand brushes at the entrance to the shop.

  ‘’Ere!’ I called to him rudely. ‘I’ll ’ave them three!’

  He came out from behind his counter and looked me over. He took me without question for a sweep. That was reassuring. As soon as I was in connection with brushes, the very slight difference between soot and coal dust, which, all the same, the human eye unconsciously perceives, became unnoticeable.

  ‘Fifteen bob,’ he said. ‘Or you can ’ave the lot for two quid if they’re any use to you.’

  The lot looked far more imposing, for in the bundle was a set of those rods which fit into each other to push the brush up the chimney. The brushes were too mangy to be of value to any sweep but me. However, I had no intention of mixing with professionals, and a good bundle would look workman-like to the public.

  ‘Thirty bob,’ I said.

  ‘Thirty-two and a tanner,’ said he.

  I closed at that. With the brushes and rods came a couple of straps. I pushed my bicycle round the corner before fixing the bundle to it, for it was probable that the ironmonger knew how it should be done, and would spot me as an amateur if I did not follow the custom of the trade.

  I bicycled west along the Embankment with a very open mind. I was untraceable unless I made a gross mistake, and I had about eight pounds ten of the barman’s money still in my pocket. But my disguise could not be permanent. I had to sleep somewhere, and presumably sweeps washed before sleeping. They would certainly have to before taking a bed at any sort of lodging-house.

  It was soon plain that if I had had the faintest notion how to sweep chimneys, I might have followed the trade till my beard grew. I was hailed three times before I left Whitechapel. I also discovered that a sweep is a talisman. Half-wits try to touch him for luck. He suffers the same secretive and insulting pokes as a hunchback.

  It pleased me to cycle past Scotland Yard, and then along Pall Mall and St James in order to pass the club which I had proudly joined in 1938 and used uncommonly little ever since. After crossing Piccadilly I turned up into Hanover Square, and the luck descended where it was most wanted—on the sweep himself. There was a wedding under way at St George’s: carpet, awning, a packet of old bitches waiting on the ropes, and an immaculate usher on top of the steps to keep the ring clear for the bride.

  Hanover Square weddings must be rare in August. Perhaps the bride and bridegroom could not decently delay marriage any longer. But I don’t think so. The bridegroom looked as if his mind was set on anything but his poppet. It’s more likely that they got the whole fashionable outfit cheap out of season. The usher, resplendent but baggy in morning coat and striped trousers—surely the Latin habit of marrying in evening kit is more sensible? At least every guest possesses it and doesn’t have to hire a pair of pants and pray that they have been disinfected—this usher, arrayed by some Solomon in all his glory, shouted to me with a whoop of joy and rushed me up the steps just before the bride emerged. To think that a sweep should pass at that moment! I even had to kiss the little honey on her cheek. I could have done with her lips. She reminded my starved imagination of Dr Cornelia in court, shy but resigned. The recollection that such things were, was an added incentive towards acquiring as soon as possible the appeal, limited though it might be, of a clean face.

  I was offered a quid for that job. The bridal party were all obviously rolling in money, so I looked grateful but respectfully disappointed—modelling myself, so far as coal dust permitted, upon the attitude of the Corps of Commissionaires when collecting a sixpenny tip from a trouser pocket which looked good for a bob. The usher produced another quid. I could have kissed him, too.

  I crossed Oxford Street and rode into Regent’s Park, where I set myself and my bicycle down on the grass. I had made some progress since the bench on Tower Hill five hours before. I was no longer Howard-Wolferstan; until I drew attention to myself, no police on earth could make the connection between me and him. But I had come to a dead end. Ride out of London and sleep rough till my beard grew? I didn’t like it. The travelling itself was so likely to arouse comment. A sweep had to have a home. He could not be dirty before breakfast and dirty after working hours—or only at the cost of telling continual lies which sooner or later must arouse the interest of police.

  I determined to observe Bloomsbury—not the totem worshippers of professorialism, but the large-hearted visitors of colour. It was, I remembered, another frontier between the dark- and the light-skinned. Arabs, Africans and Indians poured from its institutes into the streets of London, with growing knowledge of how to spend the taxpayer’s money while continuing to buy his vote. Among these students of political economy I hoped to find a fancy dress.

  It cost me a lot of worry and self-suggestion to remain quite still by my bicycle at the south-east corner of Gordon Square. I reminded myself that I was waiting for a customer, that I was a bookmaker’s runner in my spare time, that I was summing up from the outside a mass of chimneys for which I had just contracted. But it was no good. I fidgeted. I could not compass the all-embracing stare of the working man who at the moment does not happen to be working.

  Several gentlemen from far Asia and Africa passed me. Mostly they were dressed in unimportancies; but occasionally there was a robe or a fine, outlandish hat as prescribed by national pride or religion. I spoke to two of them. They laughed nervously and quickened their pace. At last there appeared a magnificent Sikh, his head topped by a superb turban, and his natty grey flannel suit covered as far as the lapels by a black cascade of beard and whiskers. In answer to my interested examination of him, his liquid brown eyes looked at me with a sympathy which was unusual between strangers of different race and very different occupation. It was the sort of look that I myself might have given to some delicate young Indian rejoicing in the effect of her sari upon Gordon Square—doubtful but definitely interested.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, ‘but if I was to want a ’at like yours, where could I buy one?’

  He answered me with another question.

  ‘Don’t you say in England that a sweep is lucky?’

  ‘There’s them as thinks so,’ I replied. ‘Wish I could ’ave a bit meself.’

  I was taking risks with my stage cockney. I assumed that he could not tell the difference between the genuine and the false.

  ‘What do you want a pugaree for?’

  ‘Sweeps’ Annual Outin’ and Fancy Dress Ball.’

  ‘I need luck,’ he said. ‘I’ll lend you an old one. Come about ten. Here’s m
y address.’

  ‘I’ll be dirty, sir. Got a late job to-night.’

  ‘At the worst—I have a bathroom,’ he smiled, still holding me with his peculiarly gentle look.

  It seemed an odd remark. Who was I, however, bred in the cheerful barbarisms of Christendom, to decipher the motives and manners under that mass of hair? With American Indians I was at home; but that half-understanding of imperial Indians, which every educated Englishman unconsciously acquires from his reading of fiction and government publications, I did not possess. I was aware that I myself had contributed to any misunderstanding there might be. A man compelled, as I was, to make unconventional enquiries must expect unconventional replies or none at all. My opening moves, whether as sweep or Michael Bassoon, frequently met with an absolute ‘yes’ or ‘no’ which prohibited further conversation. There is little point in recording rebuffs. I number only the serenities.

  My Punjab aristocrat—for that he certainly was—passed on with a slight bow and smile, leaving me with four empty hours to employ. I walked with my bicycle into the grubby district beyond King’s Cross, and bought myself a large meal at an eating-house. It was surprisingly solid and good. To eat well in the London of to-day one must, I think, pay thirty shillings or two; between these extremes lie lakes of custard and gravy, deserts of processed meat and cheese. I could not visit a cinema in my filthy condition, so I settled down in the bar of a small pub. Even there the landlord told me pointedly that I could have a wash at the back if I liked.

  Before calling on the Sikh, I explored the neighbourhood of his lodgings. They were in a quiet, shabby street off the Hampstead Road, and most of the houses had notices of Apartments or Bed and Breakfast in the windows. It looked the right district for an exotic foreigner who had not much money, or, more likely, was not allowed by his politicians to take it abroad. Among the basement walls and bushes of a bombed site I took off my coat and trousers, and gave them such shaking and brushing as I could. The dirt of hands and face had, of course, to remain.