The House by the River
By A. P. Herbert
New York
Alfred A Knopf
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
I
The Whittakers were At Home every Wednesday. No one else in HammertonChase was officially At Home at any time. So every one went to theWhittakers' on Wednesdays.
There are still a few intimate corners in London where people, otherthan the poor, are positively acquainted with their neighbours. AndHammerton Chase is one of these. In heartless Kensington we know no moreof our neighbour than we may gather from furtive references to the RedBook and Who's Who, or stealthy reconnaissances from behind thedining-room curtains as he goes forth in the morning to his work and tohis labour. Our communication with him is limited to the throwing backover the garden-wall of his children's balls, aeroplanes, and spears,or—in the lowest parts of Kensington—to testy hammerings with thefire-irons towards the close of his musical evenings. Overt, deliberate,avoidable, social intercourse with any person living in the same streetor the same block of mansions is a thing unknown. What true Londonerremembers going to an At Home, a dance, a musical evening, or otherentertainment in his own street? Who is there who regards withfriendship the occupant of the opposite flat?
Hammerton Chase could scarcely be regarded as a street. A shorthalf-mile of old and dignified houses, clustered irregularly in allshapes and sizes along the sunny side of the Thames, with large treesand little gardens fringing the bank across the road, and, lyingopposite, the Island, a long triangle of young willows, the haunt ofwild duck and heron and swan—it had a unique, incomparable character ofits own. It was like neither street, nor road, nor avenue, nor garden,nor any other urban unit of place in London, or indeed, it was locallysupposed, in the world. It had something, perhaps, of an old village andsomething of a Cathedral Close, something of Venice and something of thesea. But it was sui generis. It was The Chase, W. 6. And the W. 6 wasgenerally considered to be superfluous.
But, whatever it was, it prided itself on the intimate and sociablerelations of its members. They were all on friendly terms with eachother, and knew exactly the circumstances and employment, the ambitions,plans, and domestic crises of each other at any given moment. They"dropped in" at each other's houses for conversation and informalentertainment; they borrowed wine-glasses for their dinner-parties andtools for their gardens and anchors for their boats. They were acommunity, a self-sufficient community, isolated geographically fromtheir natural homes in Chelsea and Kensington, W., by the drearywilderness of West Kensington and the barbarous expanse of Hammersmith,and clinging almost pathetically together in their little oasis ofcivilization.
And yet they were not suburban. They were in physical fact on the actualborders of London County; they were six miles from Charing Cross. ButEaling and the suburbs are farther still. And the soul of Ealing wasmany leagues removed from the soul of The Chase, which, like The Chase,was something not elsewhere to be discovered.
So that on Wednesdays the Whittakers were At Home in the evening, andevery one went. Andrew Whittaker was an artist and art-critic; thoughfor