cheap gasalier, they framed the fly-blown mirror and the tawdry pictures; and I know tired hands and eyes worked many hours to fashion and fix those foolish chains, saying, “It will please him– she will like to see the room look pretty;” and as I have looked at them they have grown, in some mysterious manner, beautiful to me. The gaudy-coloured child and dog irritates me, I confess; but I have watched a grimy, inartistic personage, smoothing it affectionately with toil-stained hand, while eager faces crowded round to admire and wonder at its blatant crudity. It hangs to this day in its cheap frame above the chimney-piece, the one bright spot relieving those damp-stained walls; dull eyes stare and stare again at it, catching a vista, through its flashy tints, of the far-off land of art. Christmas Waits annoy me, and I yearn to throw open the window and fling coal at them–as once from the window of a high flat in Chelsea I did. I doubted their being genuine Waits. I was inclined to the opinion they were young men seeking excuse for making a noise. One of them appeared to know a hymn with a chorus, another played the concertina, while a third accompanied with a step dance. Instinctively I felt no respect for them; they disturbed me in my work, and the desire grew upon me to injure them. It occurred to me it would be good sport if I turned out the light, softly opened the window, and threw coal at them. It would be impossible for them to tell from which window in the block the coal came, and thus subsequent unpleasantness would be avoided. They were a compact little group, and with average luck I was bound to hit one of them.
I adopted the plan. I could not see them very clearly. I aimed rather at the noise; and I had thrown about twenty choice lumps without effect, and was feeling somewhat discouraged, when a yell, followed by language singularly unappropriate to the season, told me that Providence had aided my arm. The music ceased suddenly, and the party dispersed, apparently in high glee–which struck me as curious.
One man I noticed remained behind. He stood under the lamp-post, and shook his fist at the block generally.
“Who threw that lump of coal?” he demanded in stentorian tones.
To my horror, it was the voice of the man at Eighty-eight, an Irish gentleman, a journalist like myself. I saw it all, as the unfortunate hero always exclaims, too late, in the play. He–number Eighty-eight–also disturbed by the noise, had evidently gone out to expostulate with the rioters. Of course my lump of coal had hit him–him the innocent, the peaceful (up till then), the virtuous. That is the justice Fate deals out to us mortals here below. There were ten to fourteen young men in that crowd, each one of whom fully deserved that lump of coal; he, the one guiltless, got it– seemingly, so far as the dim light from the gas lamp enabled me to judge, full in the eye.
As the block remained silent in answer to his demand, he crossed the road and mounted the stairs. On each landing he stopped and shouted–
“Who threw that lump of coal? I want the man who threw that lump of coal. Out you come.”
Now a good man in my place would have waited till number Eighty-eight arrived on his landing, and then, throwing open the door would have said with manly candour–
“_I_ threw that lump of coal. I was-,” He would not have got further, because at that point, I feel confident, number Eighty– eight would have punched his head. There would have been an unseemly fracas on the staircase, to the annoyance of all the other tenants and later, there would have issued a summons and a cross-summons. Angry passions would have been roused, bitter feeling engendered which might have lasted for years.
I do not pretend to be a good man. I doubt if the pretence would be of any use were I to try: I am not a sufficiently good actor. I said to myself, as I took off my boots in the study, preparatory to retiring to my bedroom–“Number Eighty-eight is evidently not in a frame of mind to listen to my story. It will be better to let him shout himself cool; after which he will return to his own flat, bathe his eye, and obtain some refreshing sleep. In the morning, when we shall probably meet as usual on our way to Fleet Street, I will refer to the incident casually, and sympathize with him. I will suggest to him the truth–that in all probability some fellow-tenant, irritated also by the noise, had aimed coal at the Waits, hitting him instead by a regrettable but pure accident. With tact I may even be able to make him see the humour of the incident. Later on, in March or April, choosing my moment with judgment, I will, perhaps, confess that I was that fellow-tenant, and over a friendly brandy-and-soda we will laugh the whole trouble away.”
As a matter of fact, that is what happened. Said number Eighty-eight–he was a big man, as good a fellow at heart as ever lived, but impulsive–“Damned lucky for you, old man, you did not tell me at the time.”
“I felt,” I replied, “instinctively that it was a case for delay.”
There are times when one should control one’s passion for candour; and as I was saying, Christmas waits excite no emotion in my breast save that of irritation. But I have known “Hark, the herald angels sing,” wheezily chanted by fog-filled throats, and accompanied, hopelessly out of tune, by a cornet and a flute, bring a great look of gladness to a work-worn face. To her it was a message of hope and love, making the hard life taste sweet. The mere thought of family gatherings, so customary at Christmas time, bores us superior people; but I think of an incident told me by a certain man, a friend of mine. One Christmas, my friend, visiting in the country, came face to face with a woman whom in town he had often met amid very different surroundings. The door of the little farmhouse was open; she and an older woman were ironing at a table, and as her soft white hands passed to and fro, folding and smoothing the rumpled heap, she laughed and talked, concerning simple homely things. My friend’s shadow fell across her work, and she looking up, their eyes met; but her face said plainly, “I do not know you here, and here you do not know me. Here I am a woman loved and respected.” My friend passed in and spoke to the older woman, the wife of one of his host’s tenants, and she turned towards, and introduced the younger–“My daughter, sir. We do not see her very often. She is in a place in London, and cannot get away. But she always spends a few days with us at Christmas.”
“It is the season for family re-unions,” answered my friend with just the suggestion of a sneer, for which he hated himself.
“Yes, sir,” said the woman, not noticing; “she has never missed her Christmas with us, have you, Bess?”
“No, mother,” replied the girl simply, and bent her head again over her work.
So for these few days every year this woman left her furs and jewels, her fine clothes and dainty foods, behind her, and lived for a little space with what was clean and wholesome. It was the one anchor holding her to womanhood; and one likes to think that it was, perhaps, in the end strong enough to save her from the drifting waters. All which arguments in favour of Christmas and of Christmas customs are, I admit, purely sentimental ones, but I have lived long enough to doubt whether sentiment has not its legitimate place in the economy of life.
ON THE TIME WASTED IN LOOKING BEFORE ONE LEAPS
Have you ever noticed the going out of a woman?
When a man goes out, he says–“I’m going out, shan’t be long.”
“Oh, George,” cries his wife from the other end of the house, “don’t go for a moment. I want you to–” She hears a falling of hats, followed by the slamming of the front door.
“Oh, George, you’re not gone!” she wails. It is but the voice of despair. As a matter of fact, she knows he is gone. She reaches the hall, breathless.
“He might have waited a minute,” she mutters to herself, as she picks up the hats, “there were so many things I wanted him to do.”
She does not open the door and attempt to stop him, she knows he is already half-way down the street. It is a mean, paltry way of going out, she thinks; so like a man.
When a woman, on the other hand, goes out, people know about it. She does not sneak out. She says she is going out. She says it, generally, on the afternoon of the day before; and she repeats it, at intervals, until tea-time. At tea, she suddenly decides that she won’t, that she will leave it till the day after to-morrow instead. An hour later she thinks she will go to-morrow, after all, and makes arrangements to wash her hair overnight. For the next hour or so she alternates between fits of exaltation, during which she looks forward to going out, and moments of despondency, when a sense of foreboding falls upon her. At dinner she persuades some other woman to go with her; the other woman, once persuaded, is enthusiastic about going, until she recollects that she cannot. The first woman, however, convinces her that she can.
“Yes,” replies the second woman, “but then, how about you, dear? You are forgetting the Joneses.”
“So I was,” answers the first woman, completely non-plussed. “How very awkward, and I can’t go on Wednesday. I shall have to leave it till Thursday, now.”
“But _I_ can’t go Thursday,” says the second woman.
“Well, you go without me, dear,” says the first woman, in the tone of one who is sacrificing a life’s ambition.
“Oh no, dear, I should not think of it,” nobly exclaims the second woman. “We will wait and go together, Friday!”
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” says the first woman. “We will start early” (this is an inspiration), “and be back before the Joneses arrive.”
They agree to sleep together; there is a lurking suspicion in both their minds that this may be their last sleep on earth. They retire early with a can of hot water. At intervals, during the night, one overhears them splashing water, and talking.
They come down very late for breakfast, and both very cross. Each seems to have argued herself into the belief that she has been lured into this piece of nonsense, against her better judgment, by the persistent folly of the other one. During the meal each one asks the other, every five minutes, if she is quite ready. Each one, it appears, has only her hat to put on. They talk about the weather, and wonder what it is going to do. They wish it would make up its mind, one way or the other. They are very bitter on weather that cannot make up its mind. After breakfast it still looks cloudy, and they decide to abandon the scheme altogether. The first woman then remembers that it is absolutely necessary for her, at all events, to go.
“But there is no need for you to come, dear,” she says.
Up to that point the second woman was evidently not sure whether she wished to go or whether she didn’t. Now she knows.
“Oh yes, I’ll come,” she says, “then it will be over!”
“I am sure you don’t want to go,” urges the first woman, “and I shall be quicker by myself. I am ready to start now.”
The second woman bridles.
“_I_ shan’t be a couple of minutes,” she retorts. “You know, dear, it’s generally I who have to wait for you.”
“But you’ve not got your boots on,” the first woman reminds her.
“Well, they won’t take ANY time,” is the answer. “But of course, dear, if you’d really rather I did not come, say so.” By this time she is on the verge of tears.
“Of course, I would like you to come, dear,” explains the first in a resigned tone. “I thought perhaps you were only coming to please me.”
“Oh no, I’d LIKE to come,” says the second woman.
“Well, we must hurry up,” says the first; “I shan’t be more than a minute myself, I’ve merely got to change my skirt.”
Half-an-hour later you hear them calling to each other, from different parts of the house, to know if the other one is ready. It appears they have both been ready for quite a long while, waiting only for the other one.
“I’m afraid,” calls out the one whose turn it is to be down-stairs, “it’s going to rain.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” calls back the other one.
“Well, it looks very like it.”
“What a nuisance,” answers the up-stairs woman; “shall we put it off?”
“Well, what do YOU think, dear?” replies the down-stairs.
They decide they will go, only now they will have to change their boots, and put on different hats.
For the next ten minutes they are still shouting and running about. Then it seems as if they really were ready, nothing remaining but for them to say “Good-bye,” and go.
They begin by kissing the children. A woman never leaves her house without secret misgivings that she will never return to it alive. One child cannot be found. When it is found it wishes it hadn’t been. It has to be washed, preparatory to being kissed. After that, the dog has to be found and kissed, and final instructions given to the cook.
Then they open the front door.
“Oh, George,” calls out the first woman, turning round again. “Are you there?”
“Hullo,” answers a voice from the distance. “Do you want me?”
“No, dear, only to say good-bye. I’m going.”
“Oh, good-bye.”
“Good-bye, dear. Do you think it’s going to rain?”
“Oh no, I should not say so.”
“George.”
“Yes.”
“Have you got any money?”
Five minutes later they come running back; the one has forgotten her parasol, the other her purse.
And speaking of purses, reminds one of another essential difference between the male and female human animal. A man carries his money in his pocket. When he wants to use it, he takes it out and lays it down. This is a crude way of doing things, a woman displays more subtlety. Say she is standing in the street, and wants fourpence to pay for a bunch of violets she has purchased from a flower-girl. She has two parcels in one hand, and a parasol in the other. With the remaining two fingers of the left hand she secures the violets. The question then arises, how to pay the girl? She flutters for a few minutes, evidently not quite understanding why it is she cannot do it. The reason then occurs to her: she has only two hands and both these are occupied. First she thinks she will put the parcels and the flowers into her right hand, then she thinks she will put the parasol into her left. Then she looks round for a table or even a chair, but there is not such a thing in the whole street. Her difficulty is solved by her dropping the parcels and the flowers. The girl picks them up for her and holds them. This enables her to feel for her pocket with her right hand, while waving her open parasol about with her left. She knocks an old gentleman’s hat off into the gutter, and nearly blinds the flower-girl before it occurs to her to close it. This done, she leans it up against the flower-girl’s basket, and sets to work in earnest with both hands. She seizes herself firmly by the back, and turns the upper part of her body round till her hair is in front and her eyes behind. Still holding herself firmly with her left hand–did she let herself go, goodness knows where she would spin to;–with her right she prospects herself. The purse is there, she can feel it, the problem is how to get at it. The quickest way would, of course, be to take off the skirt, sit down on the kerb, turn it inside out, and work from the bottom of the pocket upwards. But this simple idea never seems to occur to her. There are some thirty folds at the back of the dress, between two of these folds commences the secret passage. At last, purely by chance, she suddenly discovers it, nearly upsetting herself in the process, and the purse is brought up to the surface. The difficulty of opening it still remains. She knows it opens with a spring, but the secret of that spring she has never mastered, and she never will. Her plan is to worry it generally until it does open. Five minutes will always do it, provided she is not flustered.
At last it does open. It would be incorrect to say that she opens it. It opens because it is sick of being mauled about; and, as likely as not, it opens at the moment when she is holding it upside down. If you happen to be near enough to look over her shoulder, you will notice that the gold and silver lies loose within it. In an inner sanctuary, carefully secured with a second secret spring, she keeps her coppers, together with a postage-stamp and a draper’s receipt, nine months old, for elevenpence three-farthings.
I remember the indignation of an old Bus-conductor, once. Inside we were nine women and two men. I sat next the door, and his remarks therefore he addressed to me. It was certainly taking him some time to collect the fares, but I think he would have got on better had he been less bustling; he worried them, and made them nervous.
“Look at that,” he said, drawing my attention to a poor lady opposite, who was diving in the customary manner for her purse, “they sit on their money, women do. Blest if you wouldn’t think they was trying to ‘atch it.”
At length the lady drew from underneath herself an exceedingly fat purse.
“Fancy riding in a bumpby bus, perched up on that thing,” he continued. “Think what a stamina they must have.” He grew confidential. “I’ve seen one woman,” he said, “pull out from underneath ‘er a street doorkey, a tin box of lozengers, a pencil-case, a whopping big purse, a packet of hair-pins, and a smelling-bottle. Why, you or me would be wretched, sitting on a plain door-knob, and them women goes about like that all day. I suppose they gets used to it. Drop ’em on an eider-down pillow, and they’d scream. The time it takes me to get tuppence out of them, why, it’s ‘eart-breaking. First they tries one side, then they tries the other. Then they gets up and shakes theirselves till the bus jerks them back again, and there they are, a more ‘opeless ‘eap than ever. If I ‘ad my way I’d make every bus carry a female searcher as could over’aul ’em one at a time, and take the money from ’em. Talk about the poor pickpocket. What I say is, that a man as finds his way into a woman’s pocket–well, he deserves what he gets.”
But it was the thought of more serious matters that lured me into reflections concerning the over-carefulness of women. It is a theory of mine–wrong possibly; indeed I have so been informed–that we pick our way through life with too much care. We are for ever looking down upon the ground. Maybe, we do avoid a stumble or two over a stone or a brier, but also we miss the blue of the sky, the glory of the hills. These books that good men write, telling us that what they call “success” in life depends on our flinging aside our youth and wasting our manhood in order that we may have the means when we are eighty of spending a rollicking old age, annoy me. We save all our lives to invest in a South Sea Bubble; and in skimping and scheming, we have grown mean, and narrow, and hard. We will put off the gathering of the roses till tomorrow, to-day it shall be all work, all bargain-driving, all plotting. Lo, when to- morrow comes, the roses are blown; nor do we care for roses, idle things of small marketable value; cabbages are more to our fancy by the time to-morrow comes.
Life is a thing to be lived, not spent, to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one’s hand by skill to be made the best of. Is it the wisest who is always the most successful? I think not. The luckiest whist-player I ever came across was a man who was never QUITE certain what were trumps, and whose most frequent observation during the game was “I really beg your pardon,” addressed to his partner; a remark which generally elicited the reply, “Oh, don’t apologize. All’s well that ends well.” The man I knew who made the most rapid fortune was a builder in the outskirts of Birmingham, who could not write his name, and who, for thirty years of his life, never went to bed sober. I do not say that forgetfulness of trumps should be cultivated by whist-players. I think my builder friend might have been even more successful had he learned to write his name, and had he occasionally–not overdoing it–enjoyed a sober evening. All I wish to impress is, that virtue is not the road to success–of the kind we are dealing with. We must find other reasons for being virtuous; maybe, there are some. The truth is, life is a gamble pure and simple, and the rules we lay down for success are akin to the infallible systems with which a certain class of idiot goes armed each season to Monte Carlo. We can play the game with coolness and judgment, decide when to plunge and when to stake small; but to think that wisdom will decide it, is to imagine that we have discovered the law of chance. Let us play the game of life as sportsmen, pocketing our winnings with a smile, leaving our losings with a shrug. Perhaps that is why we have been summoned to the board and the cards dealt round: that we may learn some of the virtues of the good gambler; his self-control, his courage under misfortune, his modesty under the strain of success, his firmness, his alertness, his general indifference to fate. Good lessons these, all of them. If by the game we learn some of them our time on the green earth has not been wasted. If we rise from the table having learned only fretfulness and self-pity I fear it has been.
The grim Hall Porter taps at the door: “Number Five hundred billion and twenty-eight, your boatman is waiting, sir.”
So! is it time already? We pick up our counters. Of what use are they? In the country the other side of the river they are no tender. The blood-red for gold, and the pale-green for love, to whom shall we fling them? Here is some poor beggar longing to play, let us give them to him as we pass out. Poor devil! the game will amuse him–for a while.
Keep your powder dry, and trust in Providence, is the motto of the wise. Wet powder could never be of any possible use to you. Dry, it may be, WITH the help of Providence. We will call it Providence, it is a prettier name than Chance–perhaps also a truer.
Another mistake we make when we reason out our lives is this: we reason as though we were planning for reasonable creatures. It is a big mistake. Well-meaning ladies and gentlemen make it when they picture their ideal worlds. When marriage is reformed, and the social problem solved, when poverty and war have been abolished by acclamation, and sin and sorrow rescinded by an overwhelming parliamentary majority! Ah, then the world will be worthy of our living in it. You need not wait, ladies and gentlemen, so long as you think for that time. No social revolution is needed, no slow education of the people is necessary. It would all come about to-morrow, IF ONLY WE WERE REASONABLE CREATURES.
Imagine a world of reasonable beings! The Ten Commandments would be unnecessary: no reasoning being sins, no reasoning creature makes mistakes. There would be no rich men, for what reasonable man cares for luxury and ostentation? There would be no poor: that I should eat enough for two while my brother in the next street, as good a man as I, starves, is not reasonable. There would be no difference of opinion on any two points: there is only one reason. You, dear Reader, would find, that on all subjects you were of the same opinion as I. No novels would be written, no plays performed; the lives of reasonable creatures do not afford drama. No mad loves, no mad laughter, no scalding tears, no fierce unreasoning, brief-lived joys, no sorrows, no wild dreams–only reason, reason everywhere.
But for the present we remain unreasonable. If I eat this mayonnaise, drink this champagne, I shall suffer in my liver. Then, why do I eat it? Julia is a charming girl, amiable, wise, and witty; also she has a share in a brewery. Then, why does John marry Ann? who is short-tempered, to say the least of it, who, he feels, will not make him so good a house-wife, who has extravagant notions, who has no little fortune. There is something about Ann’s chin that fascinates him–he could not explain to you what. On the whole, Julia is the better-looking of the two. But the more he thinks of Julia, the more he is drawn towards Ann. So Tom marries Julia and the brewery fails, and Julia, on a holiday, contracts rheumatic fever, and is a helpless invalid for life; while Ann comes in for ten thousand pounds left to her by an Australian uncle no one had ever heard of,
I have been told of a young man, who chose his wife with excellent care. Said he to himself, very wisely, “In the selection of a wife a man cannot be too circumspect.” He convinced himself that the girl was everything a helpmate should be. She had every virtue that could be expected in a woman, no faults, but such as are inseparable from a woman. Speaking practically, she was perfection. He married her, and found she was all he had thought her. Only one thing could he urge against her–that he did not like her. And that, of course, was not her fault.
How easy life would be did we know ourselves. Could we always be sure that tomorrow we should think as we do today. We fall in love during a summer holiday; she is fresh, delightful, altogether charming; the blood rushes to our head every time we think of her. Our ideal career is one of perpetual service at her feet. It seems impossible that Fate could bestow upon us any greater happiness than the privilege of cleaning her boots, and kissing the hem of her garment–if the hem be a little muddy that will please us the more. We tell her our ambition, and at that moment every word we utter is sincere. But the summer holiday passes, and with it the holiday mood, and winter finds us wondering how we are going to get out of the difficulty into which we have landed ourselves. Or worse still, perhaps, the mood lasts longer than is usual. We become formally engaged. We marry–I wonder how many marriages are the result of a passion that is burnt out before the altar-rails are reached?–and three months afterwards the little lass is broken-hearted to find that we consider the lacing of her boots a bore. Her feet seem to have grown bigger. There is no excuse for us, save that we are silly children, never sure of what we are crying for, hurting one another in our play, crying very loudly when hurt ourselves.
I knew an American lady once who used to bore me with long accounts of the brutalities exercised upon her by her husband. She had instituted divorce proceedings against him. The trial came on, and she was highly successful. We all congratulated her, and then for some months she dropped out of my life. But there came a day when we again found ourselves together. One of the problems of social life is to know what to say to one another when we meet; every man and woman’s desire is to appear sympathetic and clever, and this makes conversation difficult, because, taking us all round, we are neither sympathetic nor clever–but this by the way.
Of course, I began to talk to her about her former husband. I asked her how he was getting on. She replied that she thought he was very comfortable.
“Married again?” I suggested.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Serve him right,” I exclaimed, “and his wife too.” She was a pretty, bright-eyed little woman, my American friend, and I wished to ingratiate myself. “A woman who would marry such a man, knowing what she must have known of him, is sure to make him wretched, and we may trust him to be a curse to her.”
My friend seemed inclined to defend him.
“I think he is greatly improved,” she argued.
“Nonsense!” I returned, “a man never improves. Once a villain, always a villain.”
“Oh, hush!” she pleaded, “you mustn’t call him that.”
“Why not?” I answered. “I have heard you call him a villain yourself.”
“It was wrong of me,” she said, flushing. “I’m afraid he was not the only one to be blamed; we were both foolish in those days, but I think we have both learned a lesson.”
I remained silent, waiting for the necessary explanation.
“You had better come and see him for yourself,” she added, with a little laugh; “to tell the truth, I am the woman who has married him. Tuesday is my day, Number 2, K—- Mansions,” and she ran off, leaving me staring after her.
I believe an enterprising clergyman who would set up a little church in the Strand, just outside the Law Courts, might do quite a trade, re-marrying couples who had just been divorced. A friend of mine, a respondent, told me he had never loved his wife more than on two occasions–the first when she refused him, the second when she came into the witness-box to give evidence against him.
“You are curious creatures, you men,” remarked a lady once to another man in my presence. “You never seem to know your own mind.”
She was feeling annoyed with men generally. I do not blame her, I feel annoyed with them myself sometimes. There is one man in particular I am always feeling intensely irritated against. He says one thing, and acts another. He will talk like a saint and behave like a fool, knows what is right and does what is wrong. But we will not speak further of him. He will be all he should be one day, and then we will pack him into a nice, comfortably-lined box, and screw the lid down tight upon him, and put him away in a quiet little spot near a church I know of, lest he should get up and misbehave himself again.
The other man, who is a wise man as men go, looked at his fair critic with a smile.
“My dear madam,” he replied, “you are blaming the wrong person. I confess I do not know my mind, and what little I do know of it I do not like. I did not make it, I did not select it. I am more dissatisfied with it than you can possibly be. It is a greater mystery to me than it is to you, and I have to live with it. You should pity not blame me.”
There are moods in which I fall to envying those old hermits who frankly, and with courageous cowardice, shirked the problem of life. There are days when I dream of an existence unfettered by the thousand petty strings with which our souls lie bound to Lilliputia land. I picture myself living in some Norwegian sater, high above the black waters of a rockbound fiord. No other human creature disputes with me my kingdom. I am alone with the whispering fir forests and the stars. How I live I am not quite sure. Once a month I could journey down into the villages and return laden. I should not need much. For the rest, my gun and fishing-rod would supply me. I would have with me a couple of big dogs, who would talk to me with their eyes, so full of dumb thought, and together we would wander over the uplands, seeking our dinner, after the old primitive fashion of the men who dreamt not of ten-course dinners and Savoy suppers. I would cook the food myself, and sit down to the meal with a bottle of good wine, such as starts a man’s thoughts (for I am inconsistent, as I acknowledge, and that gift of civilization I would bear with me into my hermitage). Then in the evening, with pipe in mouth, beside my log-wood fire, I would sit and think, until new knowledge came to me. Strengthened by those silent voices that are drowned in the roar of Streetland, I might, perhaps, grow into something nearer to what it was intended that a man should be–might catch a glimpse, perhaps, of the meaning of life.
No, no, my dear lady, into this life of renunciation I would not take a companion, certainly not of the sex you are thinking of, even would she care to come, which I doubt. There are times when a man is better without the woman, when a woman is better without the man. Love drags us from the depths, makes men and women of us, but if we would climb a little nearer to the stars we must say good-bye to it. We men and women do not show ourselves to each other at our best; too often, I fear, at our worst. The woman’s highest ideal of man is the lover; to a man the woman is always the possible beloved. We see each other’s hearts, but not each other’s souls. In each other’s presence we never shake ourselves free from the earth. Match-making mother Nature is always at hand to prompt us. A woman lifts us up into manhood, but there she would have us stay. “Climb up to me,” she cries to the lad, walking with soiled feet in muddy ways; “be a true man that you may be worthy to walk by my side; be brave to protect me, kind and tender, and true; but climb no higher, stay here by my side.” The martyr, the prophet, the leader of the world’s forlorn hopes, she would wake from his dream. Her arms she would fling about his neck holding him down.
To the woman the man says, “You are my wife. Here is your America, within these walls, here is your work, your duty.” True, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand, but men and women are not made in moulds, and the world’s work is various. Sometimes to her sorrow, a woman’s work lies beyond the home. The duty of Mary was not to Joseph.
The hero in the popular novel is the young man who says, “I love you better than my soul.” Our favourite heroine in fiction is the woman who cries to her lover, “I would go down into Hell to be with you.” There are men and women who cannot answer thus–the men who dream dreams, the women who see visions–impracticable people from the Bayswater point of view. But Bayswater would not be the abode of peace it is had it not been for such.
Have we not placed sexual love on a pedestal higher than it deserves? It is a noble passion, but it is not the noblest. There is a wider love by the side of which it is but as the lamp illumining the cottage, to the moonlight bathing the hills and valleys. There were two women once. This is a play I saw acted in the daylight. They had been friends from girlhood, till there came between them the usual trouble–a man. A weak, pretty creature not worth a thought from either of them; but women love the unworthy; there would be no over-population problem did they not; and this poor specimen, ill-luck had ordained they should contend for.
Their rivalry brought out all that was worst in both of them. It is a mistake to suppose love only elevates; it can debase. It was a mean struggle for what to an onlooker must have appeared a remarkably unsatisfying prize. The loser might well have left the conqueror to her poor triumph, even granting it had been gained unfairly. But the old, ugly, primeval passions had been stirred in these women, and the wedding-bells closed only the first act.
The second is not difficult to guess. It would have ended in the Divorce Court had not the deserted wife felt that a finer revenge would be secured to her by silence.
In the third, after an interval of only eighteen months, the man died–the first piece of good fortune that seems to have occurred to him personally throughout the play. His position must have been an exceedingly anxious one from the beginning. Notwithstanding his flabbiness, one cannot but regard him with a certain amount of pity- -not unmixed with amusement. Most of life’s dramas can be viewed as either farce or tragedy according to the whim of the spectator. The actors invariably play them as tragedy; but then that is the essence of good farce acting.
Thus was secured the triumph of legal virtue and the punishment of irregularity, and the play might be dismissed as uninterestingly orthodox were it not for the fourth act, showing how the wronged wife came to the woman she had once wronged to ask and grant forgiveness. Strangely as it may sound, they found their love for one another unchanged. They had been long parted: it was sweet to hold each other’s hands again. Two lonely women, they agreed to live together. Those who knew them well in this later time say that their life was very beautiful, filled with graciousness and nobility.
I do not say that such a story could ever be common, but it is more probable than the world might credit. Sometimes the man is better without the woman, the woman without the man.
ON THE NOBILITY OF OURSELVES
AN old Anglicized Frenchman, I used to meet often in my earlier journalistic days, held a theory, concerning man’s future state, that has since come to afford me more food for reflection than, at the time, I should have deemed possible. He was a bright-eyed, eager little man. One felt no Lotus land could be Paradise to him. We build our heaven of the stones of our desires: to the old, red-bearded Norseman, a foe to fight and a cup to drain; to the artistic Greek, a grove of animated statuary; to the Red Indian, his happy hunting ground; to the Turk, his harem; to the Jew, his New Jerusalem, paved with gold; to others, according to their taste, limited by the range of their imagination.
Few things had more terrors for me, when a child, than Heaven–as pictured for me by certain of the good folks round about me. I was told that if I were a good lad, kept my hair tidy, and did not tease the cat, I would probably, when I died, go to a place where all day long I would sit still and sing hymns. (Think of it! as reward to a healthy boy for being good.) There would be no breakfast and no dinner, no tea and no supper. One old lady cheered me a little with a hint that the monotony might be broken by a little manna; but the idea of everlasting manna palled upon me, and my suggestions, concerning the possibilities of sherbet or jumbles, were scouted as irreverent. There would be no school, but also there would be no cricket and no rounders. I should feel no desire, so I was assured, to do another angel’s “dags” by sliding down the heavenly banisters. My only joy would be to sing.
“Shall we start singing the moment we get up in the morning?” I asked.
“There won’t be any morning,” was the answer. “There will be no day and no night. It will all be one long day without end.”
“And shall we always be singing?” I persisted.
“Yes, you will be so happy, you will always want to sing.”
“Shan’t I ever get tired?”
“No, you will never get tired, and you will never get sleepy or hungry or thirsty.”
“And does it go on like that for ever?”
“Yes, for ever and ever.”
“Will it go on for a million years?”
“Yes, a million years, and then another million years, and then another million years after that. There will never be any end to it.”
I can remember to this day the agony of those nights, when I would lie awake, thinking of this endless heaven, from which there seemed to be no possible escape. For the other place was equally eternal, or I might have been tempted to seek refuge there.
We grown-up folk, our brains dulled by the slowly acquired habit of not thinking, do wrong to torture children with these awful themes. Eternity, Heaven, Hell are meaningless words to us. We repeat them, as we gabble our prayers, telling our smug, self-satisfied selves that we are miserable sinners. But to the child, the “intelligent stranger” in the land, seeking to know, they are fearful realities. If you doubt me, Reader, stand by yourself, beneath the stars, one night, and SOLVE this thought, Eternity. Your next address shall be the County Lunatic Asylum.
My actively inclined French friend held cheerier views than are common of man’s life beyond the grave. His belief was that we were destined to constant change, to everlasting work. We were to pass through the older planets, to labour in the greater suns.
But for such advanced career a more capable being was needed. No one of us was sufficient, he argued, to be granted a future existence all to himself. His idea was that two or three or four of us, according to our intrinsic value, would be combined to make a new and more important individuality, fitted for a higher existence. Man, he pointed out, was already a collection of the beasts. “You and I,” he would say, tapping first my chest and then his own, “we have them all here–the ape, the tiger, the pig, the motherly hen, the gamecock, the good ant; we are all, rolled into one. So the man of the future, he will be made up of many men–the courage of one, the wisdom of another, the kindliness of a third.”
“Take a City man,” he would continue, “say the Lord Mayor; add to him a poet, say Swinburne; mix them with a religious enthusiast, say General Booth. There you will have the man fit for the higher life.”
Garibaldi and Bismarck, he held, should make a very fine mixture, correcting one another; if needful, extract of Ibsen might be added, as seasoning. He thought that Irish politicians would mix admirably with Scotch divines; that Oxford Dons would go well with lady novelists. He was convinced that Count Tolstoi, a few Gaiety Johnnies (we called them “mashers” in those days), together with a humourist–he was kind enough to suggest myself–would produce something very choice. Queen Elizabeth, he fancied, was probably being reserved to go–let us hope in the long distant future–with Ouida. It sounds a whimsical theory, set down here in my words, not his; but the old fellow was so much in earnest that few of us ever thought to laugh as he talked. Indeed, there were moments on starry nights, as walking home from the office, we would pause on Waterloo Bridge to enjoy the witchery of the long line of the Embankment lights, when I could almost believe, as I listened to him, in the not impossibility of his dreams.
Even as regards this world, it would often be a gain, one thinks, and no loss, if some half-dozen of us were rolled together, or boiled down, or whatever the process necessary might be, and something made out of us in that way.
Have not you, my fair Reader, sometimes thought to yourself what a delightful husband Tom this, plus Harry that, plus Dick the other, would make? Tom is always so cheerful and good-tempered, yet you feel that in the serious moments of life he would be lacking. A delightful hubby when you felt merry, yes; but you would not go to him for comfort and strength in your troubles, now would you? No, in your hour of sorrow, how good it would be to have near you grave, earnest Harry. He is a “good sort,” Harry. Perhaps, after all, he is the best of the three–solid, staunch, and true. What a pity he is just a trifle commonplace and unambitious. Your friends, not knowing his sterling hidden qualities, would hardly envy you; and a husband that no other girl envies you–well, that would hardly be satisfactory, would it? Dick, on the other hand, is clever and brilliant. He will make his way; there will come a day, you are convinced, when a woman will be proud to bear his name. If only he were not so self-centred, if only he were more sympathetic.
But a combination of the three, or rather of the best qualities of the three–Tom’s good temper, Harry’s tender strength, Dick’s brilliant masterfulness: that is the man who would be worthy of you.
The woman David Copperfield wanted was Agnes and Dora rolled into one. He had to take them one after the other, which was not so nice. And did he really love Agnes, Mr. Dickens; or merely feel he ought to? Forgive me, but I am doubtful concerning that second marriage of Copperfield’s. Come, strictly between ourselves, Mr. Dickens, was not David, good human soul! now and again a wee bit bored by the immaculate Agnes? She made him an excellent wife, I am sure. SHE never ordered oysters by the barrel, unopened. It would, on any day, have been safe to ask Traddles home to dinner; in fact, Sophie and the whole rose-garden might have accompanied him, Agnes would have been equal to the occasion. The dinner would have been perfectly cooked and served, and Agnes’ sweet smile would have pervaded the meal. But AFTER the dinner, when David and Traddles sat smoking alone, while from the drawing-room drifted down the notes of high-class, elevating music, played by the saintly Agnes, did they never, glancing covertly towards the empty chair between them, see the laughing, curl-framed face of a very foolish little woman–one of those foolish little women that a wise man thanks God for making–and wish, in spite of all, that it were flesh and blood, not shadow?
Oh, you foolish wise folk, who would remodel human nature! Cannot you see how great is the work given unto childish hands? Think you that in well-ordered housekeeping and high-class conversation lies the whole making of a man? Foolish Dora, fashioned by clever old magician Nature, who knows that weakness and helplessness are as a talisman calling forth strength and tenderness in man, trouble yourself not unduly about those oysters nor the underdone mutton, little woman. Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us; and, now and then, when a windfall comes our way, we will dine together at a moderate-priced restaurant where these things are managed even better. Your work, Dear, is to teach us gentleness and kindliness. Lay your curls here, child. It is from such as you that we learn wisdom. Foolish wise folk sneer at you; foolish wise folk would pull up the useless lilies, the needless roses, from the garden, would plant in their places only serviceable wholesome cabbage. But the Gardener knowing better, plants the silly short-lived flowers; foolish wise folk, asking for what purpose.
As for Agnes, Mr. Dickens, do you know what she always makes me think of? You will not mind my saying?–the woman one reads about. Frankly, I don’t believe in her. I do not refer to Agnes in particular, but the woman of whom she is a type, the faultless woman we read of. Women have many faults, but, thank God, they have one redeeming virtue–they are none of them faultless.
But the heroine of fiction! oh, a terrible dragon of virtue is she. May heaven preserve us poor men, undeserving though we be, from a life with the heroine of fiction. She is all soul, and heart, and intellect, with never a bit of human nature to catch hold of her by. Her beauty, it appals one, it is so painfully indescribable. Whence comes she, whither goes she, why do we never meet her like? Of women I know a goodish few, and I look among them for her prototype; but I find it not. They are charming, they are beautiful, all these women that I know. It would not be right for me to tell you, Ladies, the esteem and veneration with which I regard you all. You yourselves, blushing, would be the first to cheek my ardour. But yet, dear Ladies, seen even through my eyes, you come not near the ladies that I read about. You are not–if I may be permitted an expressive vulgarism–in the same street with them. Your beauty I can look upon, and retain my reason–for whatever value that may be to me. Your conversation, I admit, is clever and brilliant in the extreme; your knowledge vast and various; your culture quite Bostonian; yet you do not–I hardly know how to express it–you do not shine with the sixteen full-moon-power of the heroine of fiction. You do not–and I thank you for it–impress me with the idea that you are the only women on earth. You, even you, possess tempers of your own. I am inclined to think you take an interest in your clothes. I would not be sure, even, that you do not mingle a little of “your own hair” (you know what I mean) with the hair of your head. There is in your temperament a vein of vanity, a suggestion of selfishness, a spice of laziness. I have known you a trifle unreasonable, a little inconsiderate, slightly exacting. Unlike the heroine of fiction, you have a certain number of human appetites and instincts; a few human follies, perhaps, a human fault, or shall we say two? In short, dear Ladies, you also, even as we men, are the children of Adam and Eve. Tell me, if you know, where I may meet with this supernatural sister of yours, this woman that one reads about. She never keeps any one waiting while she does her back hair, she is never indignant with everybody else in the house because she cannot find her own boots, she never scolds the servants, she is never cross with the children, she never slams the door, she is never jealous of her younger sister, she never lingers at the gate with any cousin but the right one.
Dear me, where DO they keep them, these women that one reads about? I suppose where they keep the pretty girl of Art. You have seen her, have you not, Reader, the pretty girl in the picture? She leaps the six-barred gate with a yard and a half to spare, turning round in her saddle the while to make some smiling remark to the comic man behind, who, of course, is standing on his head in the ditch. She floats gracefully off Dieppe on stormy mornings. Her baigneuse–generally of chiffon and old point lace–has not lost a curve. The older ladies, bathing round her, look wet. Their dress clings damply to their limbs. But the pretty girl of Art dives, and never a curl of her hair is disarranged. The pretty girl of Art stands lightly on tip-toe and volleys a tennis-ball six feet above her head. The pretty girl of Art keeps the head of the punt straight against a stiff current and a strong wind. SHE never gets the water up her sleeve, and down her back, and all over the cushions. HER pole never sticks in the mud, with the steam launch ten yards off and the man looking the other way. The pretty girl of Art skates in high-heeled French shoes at an angle of forty-five to the surface of the ice, both hands in her muff. SHE never sits down plump, with her feet a yard apart, and says “Ough.” The pretty girl of Art drives tandem down Piccadilly, during the height of the season, at eighteen miles an hour. It never occurs to HER leader that the time has now arrived for him to turn round and get into the cart. The pretty girl of Art rides her bicycle through the town on market day, carrying a basket of eggs, and smiling right and left. SHE never throws away both her handles and runs into a cow. The pretty girl of Art goes trout fishing in open-work stockings, under a blazing sun, with a bunch of dew-bespangled primroses in her hair; and every time she gracefully flicks her rod she hauls out a salmon. SHE never ties herself up to a tree, or hooks the dog. SHE never comes home, soaked and disagreeable, to tell you that she caught six, but put them all back again, because they were merely two or three-pounders, and not worth the trouble of carrying. The pretty girl of Art plays croquet with one hand, and looks as if she enjoyed the game. SHE never tries to accidentally kick her ball into position when nobody is noticing, or stands it out that she is through a hoop that she knows she isn’t.
She is a good, all-round sportswoman, is the pretty girl in the picture. The only thing I have to say against her is that she makes one dissatisfied with the girl out of the picture–the girl who mistakes a punt for a teetotum, so that you land feeling as if you had had a day in the Bay of Biscay; and who, every now and again, stuns you with the thick end of the pole: the girl who does not skate with her hands in her muff; but who, throwing them up to heaven, says, “I’m going,” and who goes, taking care that you go with her: the girl who, as you brush her down, and try to comfort her, explains to you indignantly that the horse took the corner too sharply and never noticed the mile-stone; the girl whose hair sea water does NOT improve.
There can be no doubt about it: that is where they keep the good woman of Fiction, where they keep the pretty girl of Art.
Does it not occur to you, Messieurs les Auteurs, that you are sadly disturbing us? These women that are a combination of Venus, St. Cecilia, and Elizabeth Fry! you paint them for us in your glowing pages: it is not kind of you, knowing, as you must, the women we have to put up with.
Would we not be happier, we men and women, were we to idealize one another less? My dear young lady, you have nothing whatever to complain to Fate about, I assure you. Unclasp those pretty hands of yours, and come away from the darkening window. Jack is as good a fellow as you deserve; don’t yearn so much. Sir Galahad, my dear– Sir Galahad rides and fights in the land that lies beyond the sunset, far enough away from this noisy little earth where you and I spend much of our time tittle-tattling, flirting, wearing fine clothes, and going to shows. And besides, you must remember, Sir Galahad was a bachelor: as an idealist he was wise. Your Jack is by no means a bad sort of knight, as knights go nowadays in this un- idyllic world. There is much solid honesty about him, and he does not pose. He is not exceptional, I grant you; but, my dear, have you ever tried the exceptional man? Yes, he is very nice in a drawing-room, and it is interesting to read about him in the Society papers: you will find most of his good qualities there: take my advice, don’t look into him too closely. You be content with Jack, and thank heaven he is no worse. We are not saints, we men–none of us, and our beautiful thoughts, I fear, we write in poetry not action. The White Knight, my dear young lady, with his pure soul, his heroic heart, his life’s devotion to a noble endeavour, does not live down here to any great extent. They have tried it, one or two of them, and the world–you and I: the world is made up of you and I–has generally starved, and hooted them. There are not many of them left now: do you think you would care to be the wife of one, supposing one were to be found for you? Would you care to live with him in two furnished rooms in Clerkenwell, die with him on a chair bedstead? A century hence they will put up a statue to him, and you may be honoured as the wife who shared with him his sufferings. Do you think you are woman enough for that? If not, thank your stars you have secured, for your own exclusive use, one of us UNexceptional men, who knows no better than to admire you. YOU are not exceptional.
And in us ordinary men there is some good. It wants finding, that is all. We are not so commonplace as you think us. Even your Jack, fond of his dinner, his conversation four-cornered by the Sporting Press–yes, I agree he is not interesting, as he sits snoring in the easy-chair; but, believe it or not, there are the makings of a great hero in Jack, if Fate would but be kinder to him, and shake him out of his ease.
Dr. Jekyll contained beneath his ample waist-coat not two egos, but three–not only Hyde but another, a greater than Jekyll–a man as near to the angels as Hyde was to the demons. These well-fed City men, these Gaiety Johnnies, these plough-boys, apothecaries, thieves! within each one lies hidden the hero, did Fate, the sculptor, choose to use his chisel. That little drab we have noticed now and then, our way taking us often past the end of the court, there was nothing by which to distinguish her. She was not over-clean, could use coarse language on occasion–just the spawn of the streets: take care lest the cloak of our child should brush her.
One morning the district Coroner, not, generally speaking, a poet himself, but an adept at discovering poetry buried under unlikely rubbish-heaps, tells us more about her. She earned six shillings a week, and upon it supported a bed-ridden mother and three younger children. She was housewife, nurse, mother, breadwinner, rolled into one. Yes, there are heroines OUT of fiction.
So loutish Tom has won the Victoria Cross–dashed out under a storm of bullets and rescued the riddled flag. Who would have thought it of loutish Tom? The village alehouse one always deemed the goal of his endeavours. Chance comes to Tom and we find him out. To Harry the Fates were less kind. A ne’er-do-well was Harry–drank, knocked his wife about, they say. Bury him, we are well rid of him, he was good for nothing. Are we sure?
Let us acknowledge we are sinners. We know, those of us who dare to examine ourselves, that we are capable of every meanness, of every wrong under the sun. It is by the accident of circumstance, aided by the helpful watchfulness of the policeman, that our possibilities of crime are known only to ourselves. But having acknowledged our evil, let us also acknowledge that we are capable of greatness. The martyrs who faced death and torture unflinchingly for conscience’ sake, were men and women like ourselves. They had their wrong side. Before the small trials of daily life they no doubt fell as we fall. By no means were they the pick of humanity. Thieves many of them had been, and murderers, evil-livers, and evil-doers. But the nobility was there also, lying dormant, and their day came. Among them must have been men who had cheated their neighbours over the counter; men who had been cruel to their wives and children; selfish, scandal-mongering women. In easier times their virtue might never have been known to any but their Maker.
In every age and in every period, when and where Fate has called upon men and women to play the man, human nature has not been found wanting. They were a poor lot, those French aristocrats that the Terror seized: cowardly, selfish, greedy had been their lives. Yet there must have been good, even in them. When the little things that in their little lives they had thought so great were swept away from them, when they found themselves face to face with the realities; then even they played the man. Poor shuffling Charles the First, crusted over with weakness and folly, deep down in him at last we find the great gentleman.
I like to hear stories of the littleness of great men. I like to think that Shakespeare was fond of his glass. I even cling to the tale of that disgraceful final orgie with friend Ben Jonson. Possibly the story may not be true, but I hope it was. I like to think of him as poacher, as village ne’er-do-well, denounced by the local grammar-school master, preached at by the local J. P. of the period. I like to reflect that Cromwell had a wart on his nose; the thought makes me more contented with my own features. I like to think that he put sweets upon the chairs, to see finely-dressed ladies spoil their frocks; to tell myself that he roared with laughter at the silly jest, like any East End ‘Arry with his Bank Holiday squirt of dirty water. I like to read that Carlyle threw bacon at his wife and occasionally made himself highly ridiculous over small annoyances, that would have been smiled at by a man of well-balanced mind. I think of the fifty foolish things a week _I_ do, and say to myself, “I, too, am a literary man.”
I like to think that even Judas had his moments of nobility, his good hours when he would willingly have laid down his life for his Master. Perhaps even to him there came, before the journey’s end, the memory of a voice saying–“Thy sins be forgiven thee.” There must have been good, even in Judas.
Virtue lies like the gold in quartz, there is not very much of it, and much pains has to be spent on the extracting of it. But Nature seems to think it worth her while to fashion these huge useless stones, if in them she may hide away her precious metals. Perhaps, also, in human nature, she cares little for the mass of dross, provided that by crushing and cleansing she can extract from it a little gold, sufficient to repay her for the labour of the world. We wonder why she troubles to make the stone. Why cannot the gold lie in nuggets on the surface? But her methods are secrets to us. Perchance there is a reason for the quartz. Perchance there is a reason for the evil and folly, through which run, unseen to the careless eye, the tiny veins of virtue.
Aye, the stone predominates, but the gold is there. We claim to have it valued. The evil that there is in man no tongue can tell. We are vile among the vile, a little evil people. But we are great. Pile up the bricks of our sins till the tower knocks at Heaven’s gate, calling for vengeance, yet we are great–with a greatness and a virtue that the untempted angels may not reach to. The written history of the human race, it is one long record of cruelty, of falsehood, of oppression. Think you the world would be spinning round the sun unto this day, if that written record were all? Sodom, God would have spared had there been found ten righteous men within its walls. The world is saved by its just men. History sees them not; she is but the newspaper, a report of accidents. Judge you life by that? Then you shall believe that the true Temple of Hymen is the Divorce Court; that men are of two classes only, the thief and the policeman; that all noble thought is but a politician’s catchword. History sees only the destroying conflagrations, she takes no thought of the sweet fire-sides. History notes the wrong; but the patient suffering, the heroic endeavour, that, slowly and silently, as the soft processes of Nature re-clothing with verdure the passion-wasted land, obliterate that wrong, she has no eyes for. In the days of cruelty and oppression–not altogether yet of the past, one fears–must have lived gentle-hearted men and women, healing with their help and sympathy the wounds that else the world had died of. After the thief, riding with jingle of sword and spur, comes, mounted on his ass, the good Samaritan. The pyramid of the world’s evil–God help us! it rises high, shutting out almost the sun. But the record of man’s good deeds, it lies written in the laughter of the children, in the light of lovers’ eyes, in the dreams of the young men; it shall not be forgotten. The fires of persecution served as torches to show Heaven the heroism that was in man. From the soil of tyranny sprang self-sacrifice, and daring for the Right. Cruelty! what is it but the vile manure, making the ground ready for the flowers of tenderness and pity? Hate and Anger shriek to one another across the ages, but the voices of Love and Comfort are none the less existent that they speak in whispers, lips to ear.
We have done wrong, oh, ye witnessing Heavens, but we have done good. We claim justice. We have laid down our lives for our friends: greater love hath no man than this. We have fought for the Right. We have died for the Truth–as the Truth seemed to us. We have done noble deeds; we have lived noble lives; we have comforted the sorrowful; we have succoured the weak. Failing, falling, making in our blindness many a false step, yet we have striven. For the sake of the army of just men and true, for the sake of the myriads of patient, loving women, for the sake of the pitiful and helpful, for the sake of the good that lies hidden within us,–spare us, O Lord.
ON THE MOTHERLINESS OF MAN
It was only a piece of broken glass. From its shape and colour, I should say it had, in its happier days, formed portion of a cheap scent-bottle. Lying isolated on the grass, shone upon by the early morning sun, it certainly appeared at its best. It attracted him.
He cocked his head, and looked at it with his right eye. Then he hopped round to the other side, and looked at it with his left eye. With either optic it seemed equally desirable.
That he was an inexperienced young rook goes without saying. An older bird would not have given a second glance to the thing. Indeed, one would have thought his own instinct might have told him that broken glass would be a mistake in a bird’s nest. But its glitter drew him too strongly for resistance. I am inclined to suspect that at some time, during the growth of his family tree, there must have occurred a mesalliance, perhaps worse. Possibly a strain of magpie blood?–one knows the character of magpies, or rather their lack of character–and such things have happened. But I will not pursue further so painful a train: I throw out the suggestion as a possible explanation, that is all.
He hopped nearer. Was it a sweet illusion, this flashing fragment of rainbow; a beautiful vision to fade upon approach, typical of so much that is un-understandable in rook life? He made a dart forward and tapped it with his beak. No, it was real–as fine a lump of jagged green glass as any newly-married rook could desire, and to be had for the taking. SHE would be pleased with it. He was a well- meaning bird; the mere upward inclination of his tail suggested earnest though possibly ill-directed endeavour.
He turned it over. It was an awkward thing to carry; it had so very many corners. But he succeeded at last in getting it firmly between his beak, and in haste, lest some other bird should seek to dispute with him its possession, at once flew off with it.
A second rook who had been watching the proceedings from the lime tree, called to a third who was passing. Even with my limited knowledge of the language I found it easy to follow the conversation: it was so obvious.
“Issachar!”
“Hallo!”
“What do you think? Zebulan’s found a piece of broken bottle. He’s going to line his nest with it.”
“No!”
“God’s truth. Look at him. There he goes, he’s got it in his beak.”
“Well, I’m –!”
And they both burst into a laugh.
But Zebulan heeded them not. If he overheard, he probably put down the whole dialogue to jealousy. He made straight for his tree. By standing with my left cheek pressed close against the window-pane, I was able to follow him. He is building in what we call the Paddock elms–a suburb commenced only last season, but rapidly growing. I wanted to see what his wife would say.
At first she said nothing. He laid it carefully down on the branch near the half-finished nest, and she stretched up her head and looked at it.
Then she looked at him. For about a minute neither spoke. I could see that the situation was becoming strained. When she did open her beak, it was with a subdued tone, that had a vein of weariness running through it.
“What is it?” she asked.
He was evidently chilled by her manner. As I have explained, he is an inexperienced young rook. This is clearly his first wife, and he stands somewhat in awe of her.
“Well, I don’t exactly know what it’s CALLED,” he answered.
“Oh.”
“No. But it’s pretty, isn’t it?” he added. He moved it, trying to get it where the sun might reach it. It was evident he was admitting to himself that, seen in the shade, it lost much of its charm.
“Oh, yes; very pretty,” was the rejoinder; “perhaps you’ll tell me what you’re going to do with it.”
The question further discomforted him. It was growing upon him that this thing was not going to be the success he had anticipated. It would be necessary to proceed warily.
“Of course, it’s not a twig,” he began.
“I see it isn’t.”
“No. You see, the nest is nearly all twigs as it is, and I thought- -“
“Oh, you did think.”
“Yes, my dear. I thought–unless you are of opinion that it’s too showy–I thought we might work it in somewhere.”
Then she flared out.
“Oh, did you? You thought that a good idea. An A1 prize idiot I seem to have married, I do. You’ve been gone twenty minutes, and you bring me back an eight-cornered piece of broken glass, which you think we might ‘work into’ the nest. You’d like to see me sitting on it for a month, you would. You think it would make a nice bed for the children to lie on. You don’t think you could manage to find a packet of mixed pins if you went down again, I suppose. They’d look pretty ‘worked in’ somewhere, don’t you think?–Here, get out of my way. I’ll finish this nest by myself.” She always had been short with him.
She caught up the offending object–it was a fairly heavy lump of glass–and flung it out of the tree with all her force. I heard it crash through the cucumber frame. That makes the seventh pane of glass broken in that cucumber frame this week. The couple in the branch above are the worst. Their plan of building is the most extravagant, the most absurd I ever heard of. They hoist up ten times as much material as they can possibly use; you might think they were going to build a block, and let it out in flats to the other rooks. Then what they don’t want they fling down again. Suppose we built on such a principle? Suppose a human husband and wife were to start erecting their house in Piccadilly Circus, let us say; and suppose the man spent all the day steadily carrying bricks up the ladder while his wife laid them, never asking her how many she wanted, whether she didn’t think he had brought up sufficient, but just accumulating bricks in a senseless fashion, bringing up every brick he could find. And then suppose, when evening came, and looking round, they found they had some twenty cart-loads of bricks lying unused upon the scaffold, they were to commence flinging them down into Waterloo Place. They would get themselves into trouble; somebody would be sure to speak to them about it. Yet that is precisely what those birds do, and nobody says a word to them. They are supposed to have a President. He lives by himself in the yew tree outside the morning-room window. What I want to know is what he is supposed to be good for. This is the sort of thing I want him to look into. I would like him to be worming underneath one evening when those two birds are tidying up: perhaps he would do something then. I have done all I can. I have thrown stones at them, that, in the course of nature, have returned to earth again, breaking more glass. I have blazed at them with a revolver; but they have come to regard this proceeding as a mere expression of light-heartedness on my part, possibly confusing me with the Arab of the Desert, who, I am given to understand, expresses himself thus in moments of deep emotion. They merely retire to a safe distance to watch me; no doubt regarding me as a poor performer, inasmuch as I do not also dance and shout between each shot. I have no objection to their building there, if they only would build sensibly. I want somebody to speak to them to whom they will pay attention.
You can hear them in the evening, discussing the matter of this surplus stock.
“Don’t you work any more,” he says, as he comes up with the last load, “you’ll tire yourself.”
“Well, I am feeling a bit done up,” she answers, as she hops out of the nest and straightens her back.
“You’re a bit peckish, too, I expect,” he adds sympathetically. “I know I am. We will have a scratch down, and be off.”
“What about all this stuff?” she asks, while titivating herself; “we’d better not leave it about, it looks so untidy.”
“Oh, we’ll soon get rid of that,” he answers. “I’ll have that down in a jiffy.”
To help him, she seizes a stick and is about to drop it. He darts forward and snatches it from her.
“Don’t you waste that one,” he cries, “that’s a rare one, that is. You see me hit the old man with it.”
And he does. What the gardener says, I will leave you to imagine.
Judged from its structure, the rook family is supposed to come next in intelligence to man himself. Judging from the intelligence displayed by members of certain human families with whom I have come in contact, I can quite believe it. That rooks talk I am positive. No one can spend half-an-hour watching a rookery without being convinced of this. Whether the talk be always wise and witty, I am not prepared to maintain; but that there is a good deal of it is certain. A young French gentleman of my acquaintance, who visited England to study the language, told me that the impression made upon him by his first social evening in London was that of a parrot-house. Later on, when he came to comprehend, he, of course, recognized the brilliancy and depth of the average London drawing-room talk; but that is how, not comprehending, it impressed him at first. Listening to the riot of a rookery is much the same experience. The conversation to us sounds meaningless; the rooks themselves would probably describe it as sparkling.
There is a Misanthrope I know who hardly ever goes into Society. I argued the question with him one day. “Why should I?” he replied; “I know, say, a dozen men and women with whom intercourse is a pleasure; they have ideas of their own which they are not afraid to voice. To rub brains with such is a rare and goodly thing, and I thank Heaven for their friendship; but they are sufficient for my leisure. What more do I require? What is this ‘Society’ of which you all make so much ado? I have sampled it, and I find it unsatisfying. Analyze it into its elements, what is it? Some person I know very slightly, who knows me very slightly, asks me to what you call an ‘At Home.’ The evening comes, I have done my day’s work and I have dined. I have been to a theatre or concert, or I have spent a pleasant hour or so with a friend. I am more inclined for bed than anything else, but I pull myself together, dress, and drive to the house. While I am taking off my hat and coat in the hall, a man enters I met a few hours ago at the Club. He is a man I have very little opinion of, and he, probably, takes a similar view of me. Our minds have no thought in common, but as it is necessary to talk, I tell him it is a warm evening. Perhaps it is a warm evening, perhaps it isn’t; in either case he agrees with me. I ask him if he is going to Ascot. I do not care a straw whether he is going to Ascot or not. He says he is not quite sure, but asks me what chance Passion Flower has for the Thousand Guineas. I know he doesn’t value my opinion on the subject at a brass farthing–he would be a fool if he did, but I cudgel my brains to reply to him, as though he were going to stake his shirt on my advice. We reach the first floor, and are mutually glad to get rid of one another. I catch my hostess’ eye. She looks tired and worried; she would be happier in bed, only she doesn’t know it. She smiles sweetly, but it is clear she has not the slightest idea who I am, and is waiting to catch my name from the butler. I whisper it to him. Perhaps he will get it right, perhaps he won’t; it is quite immaterial. They have asked two hundred and forty guests, some seventy-five of whom they know by sight, for the rest, any chance passer-by, able, as the theatrical advertisements say, ‘to dress and behave as a gentleman,’ would do every bit as well. Indeed, I sometimes wonder why people go to the trouble and expense of invitation cards at all. A sandwich-man outside the door would answer the purpose. ‘Lady Tompkins, At Home, this afternoon from three to seven; Tea and Music. Ladies and Gentlemen admitted on presentation of visiting card. Afternoon dress indispensable.’ The crowd is the thing wanted; as for the items, well, tell me, what is the difference, from the Society point of view, between one man in a black frock-coat and another?
“I remember being once invited to a party at a house in Lancaster Gate. I had met the woman at a picnic. In the same green frock and parasol I might have recognized her the next time I saw her. In any other clothes I did not expect to. My cabman took me to the house opposite, where they were also giving a party. It made no difference to any of us. The hostess–I never learnt her name–said it was very good of me to come, and then shunted me off on to a Colonial Premier (I did not catch his name, and he did not catch mine, which was not extraordinary, seeing that my hostess did not know it) who, she whispered to me, had come over, from wherever it was (she did not seem to be very sure) principally to make my acquaintance. Half through the evening, and by accident, I discovered my mistake, but judged it too late to say anything then. I met a couple of people I knew, had a little supper with them, and came away. The next afternoon I met my right hostess–the lady who should have been my hostess. She thanked me effusively for having sacrificed the previous evening to her and her friends; she said she knew how seldom I went out: that made her feel my kindness all the more. She told me that the Brazilian Minister’s wife had told her that I was the cleverest man she had ever met. I often think I should like to meet that man, whoever he may be, and thank him.
“But perhaps the butler does pronounce my name rightly, and perhaps my hostess actually does recognize me. She smiles, and says she was so afraid I was not coming. She implies that all the other guests are but as a feather in her scales of joy compared with myself. I smile in return, wondering to myself how I look when I do smile. I have never had the courage to face my own smile in the looking-glass. I notice the Society smile of other men, and it is not reassuring. I murmur something about my not having been likely to forget this evening; in my turn, seeking to imply that I have been looking forward to it for weeks. A few men shine at this sort of thing, but they are a small percentage, and without conceit I regard myself as no bigger a fool than the average male. Not knowing what else to say, I tell her also that it is a warm evening. She smiles archly as though there were some hidden witticism in the remark, and I drift away, feeling ashamed of myself. To talk as an idiot when you ARE an idiot brings no discomfort; to behave as an idiot when you have sufficient sense to know it, is painful. I hide myself in the crowd, and perhaps I’ll meet a woman I was introduced to three weeks ago at a picture gallery. We don’t know each other’s names, but, both of us feeling lonesome, we converse, as it is called. If she be the ordinary type of woman, she asks me if I am going on to the Johnsons’. I tell her no. We stand silent for a moment, both thinking what next to say. She asks me if I was at the Thompsons’ the day before yesterday. I again tell her no. I begin to feel dissatisfied with myself that I was not at the Thompsons’. Trying to get even with her, I ask her if she is going to the Browns’ next Monday. (There are no Browns, she will have to say, No.) She is not, and her tone suggests that a social stigma rests upon the Browns. I ask her if she has been to Barnum’s Circus; she hasn’t, but is going. I give her my impressions of Barnum’s Circus, which are precisely the impressions of everybody else who has seen the show.
“Or if luck be against me, she is possibly a smart woman, that is to say, her conversation is a running fire of spiteful remarks at the expense of every one she knows, and of sneers at the expense of every one she doesn’t. I always feel I could make a better woman myself, out of a bottle of vinegar and a penn’orth of mixed pins. Yet it usually takes one about ten minutes to get away from her.
“Even when, by chance, one meets a flesh-and-blood man or woman at such gatherings, it is not the time or place for real conversation; and as for the shadows, what person in their senses would exhaust a single brain cell upon such? I remember a discussion once concerning Tennyson, considered as a social item. The dullest and most densely-stupid bore I ever came across was telling how he had sat next to Tennyson at dinner. ‘I found him a most uninteresting man,’ so he confided to us; ‘he had nothing to say for himself– absolutely nothing.’ I should like to resuscitate Dr. Samuel Johnson for an evening, and throw him into one of these ‘At Homes’ of yours.”
My friend is an admitted misanthrope, as I have explained; but one cannot dismiss him as altogether unjust. That there is a certain mystery about Society’s craving for Society must be admitted. I stood one evening trying to force my way into the supper room of a house in Berkeley Square. A lady, hot and weary, a few yards in front of me was struggling to the same goal.
“Why,” remarked she to her companion, “why do we come to these places, and fight like a Bank Holiday crowd for eighteenpenny-worth of food?”
“We come here,” replied the man, whom I judged to be a philosopher, “to say we’ve been here.”
I met A—– the other evening, and asked him to dine with me on Monday. I don’t know why I ask A—– to dine with me, but about once a month I do. He is an uninteresting man.
“I can’t,” he said, “I’ve got to go to the B—–s’; confounded nuisance, it will be infernally dull.”
“Why go?” I asked.
“I really don’t know,” he replied.
A little later B—– met me, and asked me to dine with him on Monday.
“I can’t,” I answered, “some friends are coming to us that evening. It’s a duty dinner, you know the sort of thing.”
“I wish you could have managed it,” he said, “I shall have no one to talk to. The A—–s are coming, and they bore me to death.”
“Why do you ask him?” I suggested.
“Upon my word, I really don’t know,” he replied.
But to return to our rooks. We were speaking of their social instincts. Some dozen of them–the “scallywags” and bachelors of the community, I judge them to be–have started a Club. For a month past I have been trying to understand what the affair was. Now I know: it is a Club.
And for their Club House they have chosen, of course, the tree nearest my bedroom window. I can guess how that came about; it was my own fault, I never thought of it. About two months ago, a single rook–suffering from indigestion or an unhappy marriage, I know not- -chose this tree one night for purposes of reflection. He woke me up: I felt angry. I opened the window, and threw an empty soda-water bottle at him. Of course it did not hit him, and finding nothing else to throw, I shouted at him, thinking to frighten him away. He took no notice, but went on talking to himself. I shouted louder, and woke up my own dog. The dog barked furiously, and woke up most things within a quarter of a mile. I had to go down with a boot-jack–the only thing I could find handy–to soothe the dog. Two hours later I fell asleep from exhaustion. I left the rook still cawing.
The next night he came again. I should say he was a bird with a sense of humour. Thinking this might happen, I had, however, taken the precaution to have a few stones ready. I opened the window wide, and fired them one after another into the tree. After I had closed the window, he hopped down nearer, and cawed louder than ever. I think he wanted me to throw more stones at him: he appeared to regard the whole proceeding as a game. On the third night, as I heard nothing of him, I flattered myself that, in spite of his bravado, I had discouraged him. I might have known rooks better.
What happened when the Club was being formed, I take it, was this:
“Where shall we fix upon for our Club House?” said the secretary, all other points having been disposed of. One suggested this tree, another suggested that. Then up spoke this particular rook:
“I’ll tell you where,” said he, “in the yew tree opposite the porch. And I’ll tell you for why. Just about an hour before dawn a man comes to the window over the porch, dressed in the most comical costume you ever set eyes upon. I’ll tell you what he reminds me of–those little statues that men use for decorating fields. He opens the window, and throws a lot of things out upon the lawn, and then he dances and sings. It’s awfully interesting, and you can see it all from the yew tree.”
That, I am convinced, is how the Club came to fix upon the tree next my window. I have had the satisfaction of denying them the exhibition they anticipated, and I cheer myself with the hope that they have visited their disappointment upon their misleader.
There is a difference between Rook Clubs and ours. In our clubs the respectable members arrive early, and leave at a reasonable hour; in Rook Clubs, it would appear, this principle is reversed. The Mad Hatter would have liked this Club–it would have been a club after his own heart. It opens at half-past two in the morning, and the first to arrive are the most disreputable members. In Rook-land the rowdy-dowdy, randy-dandy, rollicky-ranky boys get up very early in the morning and go to bed in the afternoon. Towards dawn, the older, more orderly members drop in for reasonable talk, and the Club becomes more respectable. The tree closes about six. For the first two hours, however, the goings-on are disgraceful. The proceedings, as often as not, open with a fight. If no two gentlemen can be found to oblige with a fight, the next noisiest thing to fall back upon is held to be a song. It is no satisfaction to me to be told that rooks cannot sing. _I_ know that, without the trouble of referring to the natural history book. It is the rook who does not know it; HE thinks he can; and as a matter of fact, he does. You can criticize his singing, you can call it what you like, but you can’t stop it–at least, that is my experience. The song selected is sure to be one with a chorus. Towards the end it becomes mainly chorus, unless the soloist be an extra powerful bird, determined to insist upon his rights.
The President knows nothing of this Club. He gets up himself about seven–three hours after all the others have finished breakfast–and then fusses round under the impression that he is waking up the colony, the fat-headed old fool. He is the poorest thing in Presidents I have ever heard of. A South American Republic would supply a better article. The rooks themselves, the married majority, fathers of families, respectable nestholders, are as indignant as I am. I hear complaints from all quarters.
Reflection comes to one as, towards the close of these chill afternoons in early spring, one leans upon the paddock gate watching the noisy bustling in the bare elms.
So the earth is growing green again, and love is come again unto the hearts of us old sober-coated fellows. Oh, Madam, your feathers gleam wondrous black, and your bonnie bright eye stabs deep. Come, sit by our side, and we’ll tell you a tale such as rook never told before. It’s the tale of a nest in a topmost bough, that sways in the good west wind. It’s strong without, but it’s soft within, where the little green eggs lie safe. And there sits in that nest a lady sweet, and she caws with joy, for, afar, she sees the rook she loves the best. Oh, he has been east, and he has been west, and his crop it is full of worms and slugs, and they are all for her.
We are old, old rooks, so many of us. The white is mingling with the purple black upon our breasts. We have seen these tall elms grow from saplings; we have seen the old trees fall and die. Yet each season come to us again the young thoughts. So we mate and build and gather that again our old, old hearts may quiver to the thin cry of our newborn.
Mother Nature has but one care, the children. We talk of Love as the Lord of Life: it is but the Minister. Our novels end where Nature’s tale begins. The drama that our curtain falls upon, is but the prologue to her play. How the ancient Dame must laugh as she listens to the prattle of her children. “Is Marriage a Failure?” “Is Life worth Living?” “The New Woman versus the Old.” So, perhaps, the waves of the Atlantic discuss vehemently whether they shall flow east or west.
Motherhood is the law of the Universe. The whole duty of man is to be a mother. We labour: to what end? the children–the woman in the home, the man in the community. The nation takes thought for its future: why? In a few years its statesmen, its soldiers, its merchants, its toilers, will be gathered unto their fathers. Why trouble we ourselves about the future? The country pours its blood and treasure into the earth that the children may reap. Foolish Jacques Bonhomie, his addled brain full of dreams, rushes with bloody hands to give his blood for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. He will not live to see, except in vision, the new world he gives his bones to build–even his spinning word-whipped head knows that. But the children! they shall live sweeter lives. The peasant leaves his fireside to die upon the battle-field. What is it to him, a grain in the human sand, that Russia should conquer the East, that Germany should be united, that the English flag should wave above new lands? the heritage his fathers left him shall be greater for his sons. Patriotism! what is it but the mother instinct of a people?
Take it that the decree has gone forth from Heaven: There shall be no more generations, with this life the world shall die. Think you we should move another hand? The ships would rot in the harbours, the grain would rot in the ground. Should we paint pictures, write books, make music? hemmed in by that onward creeping sea of silence. Think you with what eyes husband and wife would look on one another. Think you of the wooing–the spring of Love dried up; love only a pool of stagnant water.
How little we seem to realize this foundation of our life. Herein, if nowhere else, lies our eternity. This Ego shall never die– unless the human race from beginning to end be but a passing jest of the Gods, to be swept aside when wearied of, leaving room for new experiments. These features of mine–we will not discuss their aesthetic value–shall never disappear; modified, varied, but in essential the same, they shall continue in ever increasing circles to the end of Time. This temperament of mine–this good and evil that is in me, it shall grow with every age, spreading ever wider, combining, amalgamating. I go into my children and my children’s children, I am eternal. I am they, they are I. The tree withers and you clear the ground, thankful if out of its dead limbs you can make good firewood; but its spirit, its life, is in fifty saplings. The tree dies not, it changes.
These men and women that pass me in the street, this one hurrying to his office, this one to his club, another to his love, they are the mothers of the world to come.
This greedy trickster in stocks and shares, he cheats, he lies, he wrongs all men–for what? Follow him to his luxurious home in the suburbs: what do you find? A man with children on his knee, telling them stories, promising them toys. His anxious, sordid life, for what object is it lived? That these children may possess the things that he thinks good for them. Our very vices, side by side with our virtues, spring from this one root, Motherhood. It is the one seed of the Universe. The planets are but children of the sun, the moon but an offspring of the earth, stone of her stone, iron of her iron. What is the Great Centre of us all, life animate and inanimate–if any life be inanimate? Is the eternal universe one dim figure, Motherhood, filling all space?
This scheming Mother of Mayfair, angling for a rich son-in-law! Not a pleasing portrait to look upon, from one point of view. Let us look at it, for a moment, from another. How weary she must be! This is her third “function” to-night; the paint is running off her poor face. She has been snubbed a dozen times by her social superiors, openly insulted by a Duchess; yet she bears it with a patient smile. It is a pitiful ambition, hers: it is that her child shall marry money, shall have carriages and many servants, live in Park Lane, wear diamonds, see her name in the Society Papers. At whatever cost to herself, her daughter shall, if possible, enjoy these things. She could so much more comfortably go to bed, and leave the child to marry some well-to-do commercial traveller. Justice, Reader, even for such. Her sordid scheming is but the deformed child of Motherhood.
Motherhood! it is the gamut of God’s orchestra, savageness and cruelty at the one end, tenderness and self-sacrifice at the other.
The sparrow-hawk fights the hen: he seeking food for his brood, she defending hers with her life. The spider sucks the fly to feed its myriad young; the cat tortures the mouse to give its still throbbing carcase to her kittens, and man wrongs man for children’s sake. Perhaps when the riot of the world reaches us whole, not broken, we shall learn it is a harmony, each jangling discord fallen into its place around the central theme, Motherhood.
ON THE INADVISABILITY OF FOLLOWING ADVICE
I was pacing the Euston platform late one winter’s night, waiting for the last train to Watford, when I noticed a man cursing an automatic machine. Twice he shook his fist at it. I expected every moment to see him strike it. Naturally curious, I drew near softly. I wanted to catch what he was saying. However, he heard my approaching footsteps, and turned on me. “Are you the man,” said he, “who was here just now?”
“Just where?” I replied. I had been pacing up and down the platform for about five minutes.
“Why here, where we are standing,” he snapped out. “Where do you think ‘here’ is–over there?” He seemed irritable.
“I may have passed this spot in the course of my peregrinations, if that is what you mean,” I replied. I spoke with studied politeness; my idea was to rebuke his rudeness.
“I mean,” he answered, “are you the man that spoke to me, just a minute ago?”
“I am not that man,” I said; “good-night.”
“Are you sure?” he persisted.
“One is not likely to forget talking to you,” I retorted.
His tone had been most offensive. “I beg your pardon,” he replied grudgingly. “I thought you looked like the man who spoke to me a minute or so ago.”
I felt mollified; he was the only other man on the platform, and I had a quarter of an hour to wait. “No, it certainly wasn’t me,” I returned genially, but ungrammatically. “Why, did you want him?”
“Yes, I did,” he answered. “I put a penny in the slot here,” he continued, feeling apparently the need of unburdening himself: “wanted a box of matches. I couldn’t get anything put, and I was shaking the machine, and swearing at it, as one does, when there came along a man, about your size, and–you’re SURE it wasn’t you?”
“Positive,” I again ungrammatically replied; “I would tell you if it had been. What did he do?”
“Well, he saw what had happened, or guessed it. He said, ‘They are troublesome things, those machines; they want understanding.’ I said, ‘They want taking up and flinging into the sea, that’s what they want!’ I was feeling mad because I hadn’t a match about me, and I use a lot. He said, ‘They stick sometimes; the thing to do is to put another penny in; the weight of the first penny is not always sufficient. The second penny loosens the drawer and tumbles out itself; so that you get your purchase together with your first penny back again. I have often succeeded that way.’ Well, it seemed a silly explanation, but he talked as if he had been weaned by an automatic machine, and I was sawney enough to listen to him. I dropped in what I thought was another penny. I have just discovered it was a two-shilling piece. The fool was right to a certain extent; I have got something out. I have got this.”
He held it towards me; I looked at it. It was a packet of Everton toffee.
“Two and a penny,” he remarked, bitterly. “I’ll sell it for a third of what it cost me.”
“You have put your money into the wrong machine,” I suggested.
“Well, I know that!” he answered, a little crossly, as it seemed to me–he was not a nice man: had there been any one else to talk to I should have left him. “It isn’t losing the money I mind so much; it’s getting this damn thing, that annoys me. If I could find that idiot Id ram it down his throat.”
We walked to the end of the platform, side by side, in silence.
“There are people like that,” he broke out, as we turned, “people who will go about, giving advice. I’ll be getting six months over one of them, I’m always afraid. I remember a pony I had once.” (I judged the man to be a small farmer; he talked in a wurzelly tone. I don’t know if you understand what I mean, but an atmosphere of wurzels was the thing that somehow he suggested.) “It was a thoroughbred Welsh pony, as sound a little beast as ever stepped. I’d had him out to grass all the winter, and one day in the early spring I thought I’d take him for a run. I had to go to Amersham on business. I put him into the cart, and drove him across; it is just ten miles from my place. He was a bit uppish, and had lathered himself pretty freely by the time we reached the town.
“A man was at the door of the hotel. He says, ‘That’s a good pony of yours.’
“‘Pretty middling,’ I says.
“‘It doesn’t do to over-drive ’em, when they’re young,’ he says.
“I says, ‘He’s done ten miles, and I’ve done most of the pulling. I reckon I’m a jolly sight more exhausted than he is.
“I went inside and did my business, and when I came out the man was still there. ‘Going back up the hill?’ he says to me.
“Somehow, I didn’t cotton to him from the beginning. ‘Well, I’ve got to get the other side of it,’ I says, ‘and unless you know any patent way of getting over a hill without going up it, I reckon I am.’
“He says, ‘You take my advice: give him a pint of old ale before you start.’
“‘Old ale,’ I says; ‘why he’s a teetotaler.’
“‘Never you mind that,’ he answers; ‘you give him a pint of old ale. I know these ponies; he’s a good ‘un, but he ain’t set. A pint of old ale, and he’ll take you up that hill like a cable tramway, and not hurt himself.’
“I don’t know what it is about this class of man. One asks oneself afterwards why one didn’t knock his hat over his eyes and run his head into the nearest horse-trough. But at the time one listens to them. I got a pint of old ale in a hand-bowl, and brought it out. About half-a-dozen chaps were standing round, and of course there was a good deal of chaff.
“‘You’re starting him on the downward course, Jim,’ says one of them. ‘He’ll take to gambling, rob a bank, and murder his mother. That’s always the result of a glass of ale, ‘cording to the tracts.’
“‘He won’t drink it like that,’ says another; ‘it’s as flat as ditch water. Put a head on it for him.’
“‘Ain’t you got a cigar for him?’ says a third.
“‘A cup of coffee and a round of buttered toast would do him a sight more good, a cold day like this,’ says a fourth.
“I’d half a mind then to throw the stuff away, or drink it myself; it seemed a piece of bally nonsense, giving good ale to a four-year-old pony; but the moment the beggar smelt the bowl he reached out his head, and lapped it up as though he’d been a Christian; and I jumped into the cart and started off, amid cheers. We got up the hill pretty steady. Then the liquor began to work into his head. I’ve taken home a drunken man more than once and there’s pleasanter jobs than that. I’ve seen a drunken woman, and they’re worse. But a drunken Welsh pony I never want to have anything more to do with so long as I live. Having four legs he managed to hold himself up; but as to guiding himself, he couldn’t; and as for letting me do it, he wouldn’t. First we were one side of the road, and then we were the other. When we were not either side, we were crossways in the middle. I heard a bicycle bell behind me, but I dared not turn my head. All I could do was to shout to the fellow to keep where he was.
“‘I want to pass you,’ he sang out, so soon as he was near enough.
“‘Well, you can’t do it,’ I called back.
“‘Why can’t I?’ he answered. ‘How much of the road do YOU want?’
“‘All of it and a bit over,’ I answered him, ‘for this job, and nothing in the way.’
“He followed me for half-a-mile, abusing me; and every time he thought he saw a chance he tried to pass me. But the pony was always a bit too smart for him. You might have thought the brute was doing it on purpose.
“‘You’re not fit to be driving,’ he shouted. He was quite right; I wasn’t. I was feeling just about dead beat.
“‘What do you think you are?’ he continued, ‘the charge of the Light Brigade?’ (He was a common sort of fellow.) ‘Who sent YOU home with the washing?’
“Well, he was making me wild by this time. ‘What’s the good of talking to me?’ I shouted back. ‘Come and blackguard the pony if you want to blackguard anybody. I’ve got all I can do without the help of that alarm clock of yours. Go away, you’re only making him worse.’
“‘What’s the matter with the pony?’ he called out.
“‘Can’t you see?’ I answered. ‘He’s drunk.’
“Well, of course it sounded foolish; the truth often does.
“‘One of you’s drunk,’ he retorted; ‘for two pins I’d come and haul you out of the cart.’
“I wish to goodness he had; I’d have given something to be out of that cart. But he didn’t have the chance. At that moment the pony gave a sudden swerve; and I take it he must have been a bit too close. I heard a yell and a curse, and at the same instant I was splashed from head to foot with ditch water. Then the brute bolted. A man was coming along, asleep on the top of a cart-load of windsor chairs. It’s disgraceful the way those wagoners go to sleep; I wonder there are not more accidents. I don’t think he ever knew what had happened to him. I couldn’t look round to see what became of him; I only saw him start. Half-way down the hill a policeman holla’d to me to stop. I heard him shouting out something about furious driving. Half-a-mile this side of Chesham we came upon a girls’ school walking two and two–a ‘crocodile’ they call it, I think. I bet you those girls are still talking about it. It must have taken the old woman a good hour to collect them together again.
“It was market-day in Chesham; and I guess there has not been a busier market-day in Chesham before or since. We went through the town at about thirty miles an hour. I’ve never seen Chesham so lively–it’s a sleepy hole as a rule. A mile outside the town I sighted the High Wycombe coach. I didn’t feel I minded much; I had got to that pass when it didn’t seem to matter to me what happened; I only felt curious. A dozen yards off the coach the pony stopped dead; that jerked me off the seat to the bottom of the cart. I couldn’t get up, because the seat was on top of me. I could see nothing but the sky, and occasionally the head of the pony, when he stood upon his hind legs. But I could hear what the driver of the coach said, and I judged he was having trouble also.
“‘Take that damn circus out of the road,’ he shouted. If he’d had any sense he’d have seen how helpless I was. I could hear his cattle plunging about; they are like that, horses–if they see one fool, then they all want to be fools.
“‘Take it home, and tie it up to its organ,’ shouted the guard.
“Then an old woman went into hysterics, and began laughing like an hyena. That started the pony off again, and, as far as I could calculate by watching the clouds, we did about another four miles at the gallop. Then he thought he’d try to jump a gate, and finding, I suppose, that the cart hampered him, he started kicking it to pieces. I’d never have thought a cart could have been separated into so many pieces, if I hadn’t seen it done. When he had got rid of everything but half a wheel and the splashboard he bolted again. I remained behind with the other ruins, and glad I was to get a little rest. He came back later in the afternoon, and I was pleased to sell him the next week for a five-pound-note: it cost me about another ten to repair myself.
“To this day I am chaffed about that pony, and the local temperance society made a lecture out of me. That’s what comes of following advice.”
I sympathized with him. I have suffered from advice myself. I have a friend, a City man, whom I meet occasionally. One of his most ardent passions in life is to make my fortune. He button-holes me in Threadneedle Street. “The very man I wanted to see,” he says; “I’m going to let you in for a good thing. We are getting up a little syndicate.” He is for ever “getting up” a little syndicate, and for every hundred pounds you put into it you take a thousand out. Had I gone into all his little syndicates, I could have been worth at the present moment, I reckon, two million five hundred thousand pounds. But I have not gone into all his little syndicates. I went into one, years ago, when I was younger. I am still in it; my friend is confident that my holding, later on, will yield me thousands. Being, however, hard-up for ready money, I am willing to part with my share to any deserving person at a genuine reduction, upon a cash basis. Another friend of mine knows another man who is “in the know” as regards racing matters. I suppose most people possess a friend of this type. He is generally very popular just before a race, and extremely unpopular immediately afterwards. A third benefactor of mine is an enthusiast upon the subject of diet. One day he brought me something in a packet, and pressed it into my hand with the air of a man who is relieving you of all your troubles.
“What is it?” I asked.