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Title: The Patchwork Papers
Author: Thurston, E. Temple (Ernest Temple)
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Patchwork Papers" ***
Transcriber’s Notes:
The original spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been retained,
with the exception of apparent typographical errors which have been
corrected.
Text in Italics is indicated between _underscores_.
Text in small capitals has been replaced by regular uppercase text.
In the original, the Table of Contents does not contain the entries to
Chapters XI, XII, and XIII. However, in the electronic version, they
have been added.
* * * * *
THE PATCHWORK PAPERS
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE APPLE OF EDEN
MIRAGE
THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE
THE
PATCHWORK PAPERS
BY
E. TEMPLE THURSTON
[Illustration: D·M·&·Co]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1910
_Some eight of these papers appear in print for the first time. For
those which have been published before, my thanks are due to the
Editors of “The Onlooker” and “The Ladies’ Field” for permission to
reprint._
_THE AUTHOR._
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY
E. TEMPLE THURSTON
_Published February 1911_
_To_
NORMAN FORBES ROBERTSON
MY DEAR NORMAN,
Here are my Patchwork Papers for you to unpick at your leisure. I have
not presumed to call them essays, since it is nowadays unseemly for a
novelist to attempt anything worthy of the name of letters—moreover,
would any one read them? By the same token, I have not dared to
call them short stories, and that, mainly because the so-called
essential love interest is conspicuous by its absence. Really they are
illustrated essays. What better name then than papers can be given them?
It may, for example, be pardonable in a paper to split an infinitive
for the sake of euphony, as I have done in “From my Portfolio,”—but to
split an infinitive in an essay! It were better to rob a church, or
speak out one’s mind about the monarchy. All such things as these are
treasonable. To call them papers then will save me much from my friends.
When they appeared serially, it was under the title “Beauties which are
Inevitable.” I altered that when I thought of you trying to remember
what the book was called, as you recommended it with a twinkle in
your eye to your friends. But that title still stands justified in my
mind, since these papers express the things which latterly have become
realities to me. For wheresoever you may go in this world—whether it be
striving to the highest heights, or descending, as some would have it,
to the deepest depths—life is just as ugly or just as beautiful as you
are inclined to find it.
In all my early work, until, in fact, I wrote “Sally Bishop,” I was
inclined to find it ugly enough in all conscience. But now beauty does
seem inevitable and, what is more, the only reality we have. For if,
as they say, God made man in His own image, then to call the ugliness
of man a reality is to curse the sight of God; in which case, it were
as well to die and have done with this business of existence altogether.
To see nothing but ugliness then, or, as the modern school would have
it, to see nothing but realism, is a form of mental suicide which,
thank God, no longer appeals to me. For when every year I find the
daffodils bringing up their glory of colour and beauty of line with
unfailing perfection, I cannot but think that man, made in God’s image,
was meant to be still more beautiful in his thoughts and deeds even
than they. Then surely what man was meant to be must be the only true
reality of what he is. All else happens to him. That is all.
Wherefore, when, in these pages, you read of Bellwattle and of Emily
the housemaid, of my little old pensioner, or of the poor woman in
Limehouse; when, too, you read my attempt to give words to the maternal
instinct; then you will see realities as I have seen them over the past
two years and I dedicate this true record of them to you, because I
know that you will take them to be as real as the beauty of Livy, the
manliness of Nod, or the colour of those wall-flowers which bloom by
the little red-brick paths in that graceful garden of yours in Kent.
Yours always,
E. TEMPLE THURSTON.
Eversley, 1910.
CONTENTS
I. THE PENSION OF THE PATCHWORK QUILT 3
II. THE MOUSE-TRAP, HENRIETTA STREET 13
III. THE WONDERFUL CITY 25
IV. BELLWATTLE AND THE LAWS OF GOD 33
V. REALISM 43
VI. THE SABBATH 55
VII. HOUSE TO LET 67
VIII. A SUFFRAGETTE 77
IX. BELLWATTLE AND THE LAWS OF NATURE 87
X. MAY EVE 101
XI. THE FLOWER BEAUTIFUL 111
XII. THE FEMININE APPRECIATION OF MATHEMATICS 123
XIII. THE MATERNAL INSTINCT 135
XIV. FROM MY PORTFOLIO 147
XV. AN OLD STRING BONNET 159
XVI. THE NEW MALADY 167
XVII. BELLWATTLE AND THE DIGNITY OF MEN 179
XVIII. THE NIGHT THE POPE DIED 193
XIX. ART 203
XX. THE VALUE OF IDLENESS 217
XXI. THE SPIRIT OF COMPETITION 229
XXII. BELLWATTLE ON THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS 243
XXIII. THE MYSTERY OF THE VOTE 257
XXIV. SHIP’S LOGS 269
I
THE PENSION OF THE PATCHWORK QUILT
I
THE PENSION OF THE PATCHWORK QUILT
So much more than you would ever dream lies hidden behind the beauty
of “The Blue Bird,” by Maurice Maeterlinck. Beauty may be the first of
its qualities. By the same token, beauty may be the last. But in the
midst, in the heart of it, there is set a deep well of truth—fathomless
almost—one of those natural wells which God, with His omnipotent
disregard of limitations, has sunk into the heart of the world.
That utter annihilation of death must be confusion to many when
expressed in terms of St. Joseph lilies. Ninety per cent. of people
will be likely to say, “How pretty!” That is the worst of it. They
ought to be feeling, “How true!”
Yet what is a man to do? He can only express the immortality that he
knows in terms of the material things he sees. St. Joseph lilies are
as good as, if not better than anything else. But they might as well
have been artichokes, which come up every year. Artichokes would have
done just as well, only that people who object to artichokes would have
said, “How silly!”
No one can object to St. Joseph lilies. Yet, whatever they are, you
will never be able to persuade the world to see the immortal truth
behind the mortal and material fact.
It was the chance of circumstance which gave me an example of that
amazing truth that old people, when they have passed away, are given
life whenever the young people think of them. To the hundreds and
thousands who have been to see “The Blue Bird” there are hundreds and
thousands to say, “How charming that idea is—the old people coming to
life again whenever any one thinks of them!”
“And how amazingly true,” said I to one who had made the remark to me.
The lady looked at me as at one who has made a needless jest and then
she laughed. Being a lady, she was polite.
But I hated that politeness. I hated the laugh which expressed it. If
chance should make her eye to fall upon this page, she will see how
I hated it. She will see also how earnestly I had meant what I said.
For I have found a proof of the truth. I know now that the old people
live. What is more, they know it too. When it comes that they pass that
Rubicon which takes them into the shadow of those portals beneath which
all the old people must wait until the Great Gates are opened—when once
they near the three-score years and ten—then they know. But they may
not speak. They may not say they know. They can only hint.
It was that an old lady hinted to me. Oh, such a broad hint it was! And
that is how I know.
She was close on seventy. Another summer, another winter, and yet
another spring, would see her three-score years and ten. The pension of
the country would be given her then and this great ambition had leapt
into the heart of her:
“I want to leave off work then, sir,” she said and a smile parted her
thin, wrinkled lips, lit two fires in her eyes, making her whole face
sparkle. “I want to leave off work then, sir, and I want to take a
little cottage. I only work now so that my sons shan’t have the expense
of keeping me. They’ve got expenses enough of their own.” Then her
little brown eyes, like beads in the deep hollows, took into them a
tender look as she thought of the trials and troubles which they had to
bear.
“Will you ever be able to get a cottage and keep yourself alive on
five shillings a week?” I asked.
She set her little mouth. She was a wee, tiny creature, shrivelled with
age. Everything about her was little and crumpled and old.
“It doesn’t need much to keep me alive now, sir,” she said. “The
cottage I can get for half a crown a week; and, of course, my sons are
real good boys—they send me a little now and then.”
I gazed at her—at her wee, withered body, wasted away to nothing in
tireless energy.
“You know you won’t care to leave off work when it comes to the time,”
said I; “you’ll hate to have nothing to do.”
She looked back at me with a cunning twinkle in her bright brown eyes.
As if she were fool enough to think that life would be bearable with
nothing to do! As if she had ever dreamed that the hands could be idle
while the heart was beating! As if she did not know that each must
labour until death stilled them both!
“I shan’t have nothing to do, sir,” she said when she had said it
already with her eyes. “Why, it’s just the time I’ve been looking for.
I’m too busy now.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Make a patchwork quilt.”
“A patchwork quilt?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“So that I can leave something behind me for people to remember me when
I’m gone.”
She said it quite cheerfully, quite happily. Her bright eyes glistened
like a wink of light in an old brown china tea-pot. She said it, too,
in that half-reserved way as though there were more to tell, but she
was not allowed even to whisper it.
Of course, there was more to tell! She never would be gone! Not really
gone! Every time you thought of her, the light of the other life would
start back into her eyes, the wrinkled lips would smile again. She
would never be really gone! And this was a hint—just a hint to let me
at least, for one, make sure about it.
“Then every night they go to bed,” said I, “and pull the patchwork
quilt tight round them——”
“Yes—and every time they throw it off in the morning——” said she.
“They’ll think of you?”
“They’ll think of me,” and she chuckled like a little child to think
how clever it was of her.
“Supposing,” said I, suddenly, in a whisper as the thought occurred to
me—“supposing you could do without any assistance from your boys——”
“I wish I could,” she said; “p’raps I can.”
“You wait and see,” said I.
Her seventieth birthday came round, and the evening before I posted to
her my little present. I made her my pensioner as long as she lives,
and on the twentieth day of each month she receives her tiny portion,
and on the twenty-first day of that month I get back in return a wee
bunch of flowers tied with red Angola wool.
“In payment of the Pension of the Patchwork Quilt,” I write, just on a
slip of paper; then off it goes every month. And as I drop it in the
letterbox, I can see her surrounded with all sorts of materials in
divers colours. I can hear the scratching of her needle as she sews
them together. I can picture her little eyes bent eagerly upon the
stitches for fear it might not be done in time.
And I take her gentle hint.
I know.
II
THE MOUSE-TRAP, HENRIETTA STREET
II
THE MOUSE-TRAP, HENRIETTA STREET
In Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, there is a mouse-trap, a cunningly
devised contrivance in which many a timid little mouse is caught. You
will find them in other streets than this. They are set in exactly the
same way, the same alluring bait, the same doors that open with so
generous an admission of innocence, the same doors that close with so
final and irrevocable a snap.
I have never watched the other ones at work. But I have seen four mice
caught at different times in Henrietta Street. Therefore, it is about
the mouse-trap in Henrietta Street that I feel qualified to speak.
One of these little mice I knew well. I knew her by name, where she
lived—the little hole in this great labyrinth of London down which she
vanished when the day’s work was done, or when any one frightened her
little wits and made her scamper home for safety. She even came once
and sat in my room, just on the edge of an armchair, taking tea and
cake in that frightened way, eyes ever peering, head ever on the alert,
as mice will eat their food.
So you will see I knew a good deal about her. It was through no
accident of chance that I saw her walk into the trap. I had heard that
such an event was likely. I was on the lookout for it.
During the day-time, she waited at the tables in an A.B.C. shop. Don’t
ask me what they paid her for it. I marvel at the wage for manual
labour when sometimes I am compelled to do a little job for myself. I
wonder why on earth the woman comes to tidy my rooms for ten shillings
a week. But she does. What is more, I find myself on the very point of
abusing her when she breaks a piece of my Lowestoft china, coming with
tears in her eyes to tell me of it.
Whatever it was they paid this little mouse of a child, she found it
a sufficient inducement to come there day after day, week after week,
with just that one short, marvellous evening in the six days and the
whole of the glorious seventh in which to do what she liked.
I suppose it would have gone on like that for ever. She would have
continued creeping in and out amongst the tables, her body on tip-toe,
her voice on tip-toe, the whole personality of her almost overbalancing
itself as it worked out its justification on the very tip of its toes.
She would have continued waiting on her customers, writing her little
checks in a wholly illegible handwriting, which only the girl at the
desk could read. She would have continued supplying me with the
three-pennyworth of cold cod steak for my kitten until I should have
been ordering five cold cod steaks for the entire family that was bound
to come. All these things would have gone on just the same, had not
the tempter come to lure her into the mouse-trap in Henrietta Street,
Covent Garden.
I saw him one morning, a dandy-looking youth from one of the hosier’s
shops in the Strand near by. He was having lunch—a cup of coffee and
some stewed figs and cream. Taste is a funny thing. And she was serving
him. She had served him. He was already hustling the food into his
mouth as he talked to her. But it was more than talking. He was saying
things with a pair of large calf eyes and she was laughing as she
listened.
I would sooner see a woman serious than see her laugh; that is, if some
one else were making love to her. For when she is serious there are two
ways about it; but when she laughs there is only time for one.
When she saw me, the little mouse came at once to the counter and took
down the piece of cold cod steak without a word. As she handed me the
bag and the little paper check, she said—
“How’s the kitten to-day?”
Then I knew she felt guilty, and was trying to distract my mind from
what she knew I had seen.
“Why are you ashamed of talking to the young man?” I asked.
“I’m not,” said she.
“Did you notice his eyes?” said I.
She looked at me for a moment, quite frightened, then she scampered
away into a corner and began wetting her pencil with her lips and
scribbling things. When the young man tapped his coffee-cup, she
pretended not to hear. But as soon as I stepped out into the street, I
turned round and saw her hurrying back to his table.
You guess how it went along. He asked her to marry him—then—there—at
once. You might have known he was a man of business.
She told me all about it when she came on one of those short evenings,
and nibbled a little piece of cake as she sat on the edge of my chair.
He wanted to marry her at once, but he was earning only eighteen
shillings a week and, as far as I could see, spent most of that on
neckties, socks and hair oil. He would no doubt begin to save it
directly they were married; but eighteen shillings was not enough to
keep them both.
“He’d better wait, then,” said I.
“He’s so afraid he’d lose me,” she whispered.
“And would he?” I asked.
She picked up a crumb from the floor, seeming thereby to suggest that
it was not in the nature of her to waste anything.
“Then I suppose you’ll be married in secret and go on just the same?”
She nodded her head.
“Where does he propose you should be married?”
“At the registry office in Henrietta Street.”
“The mouse-trap,” said I.
“No; the registry office,” she replied.
“And when’s it to be?” I asked.
“My next evening after this.”
Well, it came to that next evening. I got permission from a firm of
book-buyers to occupy a window opposite. And there I observed that
little parlour tragedy which you can see in the corner of any old
wainscotted room if only you keep quiet long enough.
It did not happen successfully that first time. For half an hour he
walked her up and down Henrietta Street. I saw my publisher come out
of his door, little dreaming of the comedy that was being played as
he passed them by. And every time they stopped outside the Registry
Office windows, she stood and read the notices of soldiers deserted the
army, of children that were lost, while he talked of the great things
that life was offering to them both just inside those varnished doors.
After a time they walked away and I came out from my hiding-place.
Something must have upset her, I thought, and I went across to look at
the notices in the window. There was nothing to frighten her there; yet
she had scampered away home to that little hole in Clapham, and there
vanished out of sight.
But it came at last. It came the very next of her short evenings. I was
on the lookout again. I saw them march up to the door. No hesitation
this time. He must have been eloquent indeed to have led her so surely
as that.
I saw him lift the spring of the trap. I saw her enter with tip-toe
steps, but more full of confidence now. Then I heard the sharp snap of
the door as it fell.
“They’ve caught a mouse,” said I to the book-buyer as I came downstairs.
“’Tis a good thing,” said he; “they’re the very devil for eating my
bindings.”
III
THE WONDERFUL CITY
III
THE WONDERFUL CITY
I saw a wonderful city to-day. Rows of houses there were. Domes of
great buildings with their dull brown roofs lifted silently into
the sky. Long streets in tireless avenues led from one cathedral to
another; some with the straightness of an arrow, others twisting and
turning in devious ways, yet all leading, as a well-planned street
should lead, to the crowning glory of some great edifice.
By the chance of Destiny I stood above it all and looked down. It was
strange that only the night before I had been dreaming that I was in
the City of New York, with its vast maze of buildings leaping to the
sky. In my dream I had stood wrapt in amazement. But I was silent with
a greater astonishment here. For as I gazed upon it, there had come a
man to my side and, seeing the direction of my eyes, he had said—
“There warn’t a trace o’ that there last night.”
“Not a trace?” said I. And I said it in amazement, for frankly I
disbelieved him.
“Not a trace,” he repeated solemnly.
“All that built in one night?” I asked again.
“In one night,” said he.
“But doesn’t it astound you?” said I. I tried to lift his lethargy to
the wonderment and admiration that was thrilling in my mind.
“It do seem strange,” he replied, “when yer come to think of it.”
“Well, then, come to think of it!” I exclaimed. “You can’t do better
than find the world strange. Come to think of it and, finding it
strange, you’ll come to believe in it!”
He stared at me with solemn eyes.
“Look at the dome of that cathedral,” I went on. “Could you set to work
and, in a single night, build a vast piece of architecture like that,
so many times higher than yourself?”
“That ain’t no cathedral,” said he.
“Have you ever seen a cathedral?” I asked.
“No.”
“Well, then, how do you know it isn’t?”
He could give me no reply and I continued in my enthusiasm—
“Look at that street, cut through all obstacles, leading straight as
though a thousand instruments of latter-day science had been used in
the making of it. Look at this avenue turning to right and to left.
Do you see that great cluster of buildings, a very parliament of
houses, set round a vast space that would shame the great square of St.
Peter’s, in Rome. Only look at the——”
I turned round and he had gone. I could see his figure retreating in
the distance. Every moment he turned his head, looking round, as one
who is pursued yet fears to show his cowardice by running away. He
thought I was mad, I have no doubt. Every one thinks you mad when you
say the moon is a dead world or the sun is a fiery furnace. To be sane,
you must only remark upon the coldness of the moon, or the warmth of
the sun. To be sane, you must speak of the things of this world only in
terms of people’s bodies. They do not understand unless.
And so, when the man left me, I was alone, looking over the wonderful
city. For an hour then, I amused myself by naming the different
streets, by assigning to the various buildings the uses to which it
seemed they might be put.
That huge edifice with the cupola of bronze was the Cathedral of
Shadows, where prayers were said in darkness and never a lamp was lit.
The street which led to its very steps, that was called the Street of
Sighs. Here, in a lighter part of the city, approached to its silent
doors by Tight Street, was the Bat’s Theatre, where you could hear,
but never see the performance as it progressed. A little further on
there was Blind Alley—a cul-de-sac, terminating in a tiny building, the
Chapel of Disappointment. There was the Avenue of Progress, the Church
of Whispers, the Bridge of Stones and a thousand other places, the
names of which went from me no sooner than they crossed my mind.
It may be possible to build a wonderful city in a night. I only know
how utterly impossible it is to name all its streets and its palaces in
one day.
And then, while I was still thus employed, I saw the man returning with
a jug of beer.
I nodded to the vessel which he carried in his hand.
“You don’t need to think about that,” said I, “to understand it.”
A broad grin spread across his face. He had found me sane after all. I
had talked about beer in terms of bodily comfort.
“I need to drink it,” said he with a laugh.
“You do,” said I.
Then, as if to appease me for the moment e’er he passed on his way, he
returned to our former subject and, with a serious voice, he said—
“When yer come to think of it,” said he, “it do seem wonderful that
them moles is blind.”
“Not so blind,” said I, looking down at the wonderful city, “not so
blind as those who can see.”
He thought I had gone mad again, and he walked away with his jug of
beer.
IV
BELLWATTLE AND THE LAWS OF GOD
IV
BELLWATTLE AND THE LAWS OF GOD
I often wonder why God evolved a creature so antagonistic to all His
laws as woman. I must tell you what I mean.
Bellwattle—she is named Bellwattle for the simple reason that one
day in an inspired moment, she called her husband Cruikshank, and he
replied giving her the name Bellwattle, quite foolish except between
husband and wife—Bellwattle has the genuine mother’s heart for animals.
Everything that crawls, walks or flies, Bellwattle loves. Some things,
certainly, she loves more than others; but for all she has the
deep-rooted, protective instinct. Spiders, for example, terrify her;
flies and beetles she loathes, but would not kill one of them even if
they crawled upon her dress. And they do.
Now Bellwattle has a garden which she loves. You can see already, if
you have but the mind for it, the tragic conflict which, with that love
of her flowers, she must wage between her own soul and the laws of God.
For this, I must tell you, is a lovely garden—not one of those prim-set
portions, with well-cut hedges and beds in orthodox array. It is an old
garden that has been allowed to run to ruin and Bellwattle, possessing
it in the nick of time, has planted primroses amongst the nettles; has
carved a little herbaceous border where once potatoes grew. She has
thrown roses here, there, and everywhere and, in soap and sugar boxes
covered with glass at the bottom of the garden under the nut trees, she
forces the old-fashioned flowers that we knew—you and I—in the long-ago
days when sweet-william and candytuft were things to boast about and
foxgloves grew like beanstalks up to heaven.
But perhaps the most glorious thing in Bellwattle’s garden, that also
in which she takes the greatest pride, is her hedges of sweet pea. They
grow in great walls of dazzling colour, and the bees hum about them all
day long. But they are the devil and all to raise.
Now this is where the tragic conflict comes in, between the mice and
the birds and the slugs and Bellwattle’s kitten and Bellwattle’s heart.
It is a terrible conflict, I can tell you; for the laws of God are
unalterable, and so is the heart of Bellwattle.
This, then, is what happens: Bellwattle forgot to cover the sweet pea
seeds with red lead. It is just the sort of thing a woman would forget.
I doubt if I could think of it myself. Then followed the natural
result. A shrew-mouse got hold of one or two of them, and Bellwattle
wondered why on earth God ever made shrew-mice.
“But they’re dear little things,” I told her.
“I can’t help that,” said she. “What’s the sense in making a thing that
goes and eats up other things?”
Which, of course, was unanswerable.
Two days after this had happened, the kitten was seen playing with a
live shrew-mouse.
Bellwattle screamed.
“Oh, the little wretch! If I could only catch it!”
“What—the mouse?” shouted Cruikshank.
“No, no; the wretched little kitten! Look at the way she’s torturing
it! Oh, I never saw such a cruel little beast in all my life!” and her
face grew rosy red.
Now, Cruikshank is a dutiful husband. Moreover, he knows positively
nothing about women. Perhaps that is why. When, therefore, he realised
that it was the kitten who was the cruel little beast, and a sense of
duty claiming him, he chased it all over the garden, picking up stones
as he ran.
“Make her drop it!” cried Bellwattle.
“I will, if I can hit her,” replied Cruikshank and, like a cowboy
throwing a lasso from a galloping horse, he flung a stone. The kitten
was struck upon the flank and in its terror it dropped the mouse and
fled. Cruikshank approached it and, he assures me, with much pride in
his prowess picked up the poor little mouse by the hind leg. Then he
looked up and saw Bellwattle’s face. It was white—ashen white.
“You’ve hurt her,” she said, half under her breath.
“It’s better than hurt,” said Cruikshank—“it’s dead.”
“No—the kitten—you hit it with a stone.”
“’Twas a jolly good shot,” said Cruikshank.
“I never meant you to hit her,” said Bellwattle.
Cruikshank looked disappointed. To hit a flying object whilst one is in
a tornado of motion one’s self is no mean feat. Failing an appreciation
of the woman herself, I am not surprised he was disappointed.
“I made her drop it, anyhow,” he said.
“You’ve frightened her out of her life and now perhaps she’ll never
come back,” said Bellwattle, and in and out of the garden she went,
all through the forests of rhododendra—where the kitten, I should tell
you, hunts for big game—and with the gentlest, the softest, the most
wooing voice in the world, she cried the kitten’s name. Cruikshank was
at a loss to understand it. When he met her down one of the paths still
calling, with tears in her eyes, he assures me he felt so ashamed of
himself that he began, in a feeble way, calling for the kitten too.
When they met again, still unsuccessful in their search, he dared not
look her in the face.
Now this is only one of the conflicts that take place in Bellwattle’s
soul. She worships the birds, but they eat the young shoots of the
sweet peas. Then she hates them; then the kitten catches one. And now,
Cruikshank tells me, he will have no hand in the matter.
“You leave it to God,” I advised.
“I do,” said he; “it’s too difficult for me.”
I believe myself it is too difficult for God.
Only the other day, in the farmyard, Bellwattle saw two cocks
fighting—fighting for the supremacy of the yard. Cruikshank and I
looked on, really enjoying the sport of it in our hearts, yet deadly
afraid of saying so.
“Can’t you stop them?” exclaimed Bellwattle. “They’re hurting each
other!”
We neither of us moved a hand.
“If you don’t, I shall have to go and do it myself,” said she.
“Much better leave it to God,” said I. “They’re settling matters that
have nothing to do with you.”
But do you think logic so profound as that deterred her? Not a bit
of it! Out she ran into the farmyard, throwing her arms about in the
air—as women will when they wish to interfere with the laws of God.
“Shoo! shoo! shoo!” shouted Bellwattle.
And one of the cocks, at the critical moment of victory, reluctantly
leaving go of its opponent’s comb, looked up with considerable
annoyance into her face and shrieked back—
“Cock-a-doodle-do!”
Cruikshank glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and out of the
corner of his mouth he whispered—
“We shan’t have any eggs to-morrow.”
V
REALISM
V
REALISM
This word—realism—has lost its meaning. So, for that matter, has many
another word in the language. Sentiment is one and, as a natural
consequence, the word sentimental is another. Realism and sentiment,
in fact, have got so shuffled about, for all the world like the King
and Queen in a pack of cards that now, instead of sentiment being hand
in hand with reality, they have become almost opposed. To express a
sentiment is now tantamount to ignoring a reality.
Joseph Surface may be responsible for this. It would not seem unlikely.
But wherever the responsibility lies, it is an everlasting pity; no one
has had the common politeness to replace or even create a substitute
for the thing which they have taken away.
Realism, which now means an expression of things as they happen without
any relation to things as they immortally are, is robbed of its true
significance. But no word is left in its place. Sentiment, which now
means an expression of momentary emotionalism, instead of what one
perceives to be true in the highest moments of one’s thoughts, has left
a blank in the language which no one seems willing to or capable of
filling up.
Now all this is an irreparable loss. How great a loss it is can be seen
by the fact that no two people’s terminology is the same when they are
discussing a subject wherein these words must be employed. In the space
of five minutes both are at cross purposes; in a tangle from which they
find it well-nigh impossible to extricate themselves.
I do not for one instant propose to supply here a solution to the
difficulty; nor can I coin two words to repair the loss sustained. All
I wish to do is to tell a real story, one that happened only a short
while ago, to illustrate what seems to me to be realism in comparison
with what realism is supposed to be.
Our little servant-girl was married—married to the young man who
brought the milk of a morning. The courtship had been going on for some
time before I realised the glorious things that were happening. Then,
when I was told about it, I used to peep out of my bedroom window. As
soon as I heard that cry of his—impossible to write—when he opened the
gate and rattled with his can down the area steps, then up I jumped
from my bed and lifted the window.
They must have been wonderful moments for Emily, those early mornings
when, with heart beating at the sound of his cry, she had run for the
big white jug, then dragged out the time lest he should think she had
opened the door too eagerly.
Many a time have I seen them down at the bottom of those area steps;
she leaning up against the pillar of the door watching him, rapt in
admiration, while he filled up the big white jug.
It is a fine thing for you when your little maid has eyes for the
milkman. You get a good measure, I can tell you. He would not seem
stingy to her for the world. I have seen him dipping his little
half-pint measure times and again into the big can as he talked to her
and, as she held out the white jug, just trickling it in till our two
pints were more than accounted for.
All this went on for weeks together. Emily sang like a lark in the
morning when she rose betimes to do her work. The worst of the
scrubbing was all finished with and Emily’s hair was tidy long before
there came that weird falsetto cry, or the sound of the milk cans
rattled down the area steps. Oh, I can assure you, it is an excellent
thing when your little maid has eyes for the milkman. She never gets up
late of a morning.
And then, at last, with great to-doings in Emily’s home out at Walham
Green, they were married. I asked Emily what she would like for a
wedding present and she said:
“I’d like one o’ them old brass candlesticks—same as what you ’ave in
your study.”
You see Emily had acquired some taste. I call it taste because it is
mine. Good or bad, she had acquired it.
“Wouldn’t you prefer silver?” I asked, thinking I knew what silver
would mean in Walham Green.
But she only replied:
“No—I like the brass ones—’cos they’re old. I’ve a fancy for old
things.”
So a pair of old brass candlesticks was what I gave her. She wrote
and thanked me for them. She said they looked just lovely on George’s
writing table and that one of these days, when I was passing that way,
I ought to go and look at them.
I did pass through Walham Green eventually. It was some months later.
She had probably forgotten all about having asked me, but I paid my
visit all the same.
For a moment or so, as I stood on the doorstep, I felt a twinge of
trepidation. I could not remember her married name. But it was all
right. She opened the door herself. Then, as she stood there, with a
beaming smile lighting her face from ear to ear, reminding me so well
of those early mornings when I used to peep out of my bedroom window
and peer into the area below, I saw that soon there would be another
little Emily or another perky little George to bring a smile or a cry
into the world.
“You’re happy?” said I.
“Oh—sir!” said she.
She showed me up then to the sitting-room where was George’s writing
table and the pair of old brass candlesticks. She pointed to the table.
“’E made it ’imself,” she said, not meaning it in explanation; but
it did explain the queer shape. “’E made it out of an old box and I
covered it with felt. Ain’t it splendid?”
I agreed with my whole heart. Everything was splendid. The whole room
might have been made out of an old box. And yet I could see what a joy
it was to her. There was her acquired taste in evidence everywhere,
but except for my poor pair of candlesticks, everything was imitation.
It made no matter. She thought they were really old and liked them
immeasurably better than the things I had collected with such care at
home.
“Could anything be nicer than this?” said I with real enthusiasm.
“I don’t believe it could, sir,” said she.
And then, in little half-amused, half-curious, half-frightened
whispers, she told me how they were going to call the baby after me.
“Supposing it’s a girl,” said I.
No—they had not reckoned on that. When you make up your mind properly
to a boy—a boy it is up to the last moment. After that, you forget how
you made up your mind, you are so wildly delighted that it is alive at
all.
I walked across to the window.
“So you’re radiantly happy,” I said.
“’E’s just wonderful,” she replied; “I thought it couldn’t last at
first—but it’s just the same.”
I gazed out of the window—envious, perhaps.
“What does this look on to?” I asked.
“A slaughter-house, sir.”
She said it full of cheerfulness, full of the joy of her own
life. I stared and stared out of the window. A slaughter-house! A
slaughter-house! and here was a little slip of a woman passing through
those trembling hours before the birth of her first child!
Now _that_ is what your realist would call a chance! He would make a
fine subject out of that. He would show you the growth of that idea
in the woman’s mind. He would picture her drawn to gaze out of that
awesome window whenever they dragged the lowing, frightened cattle to
their doom. And last of all, with wonderful photographic touches, he
would describe for you the birth of a _still-born_ child. Then with a
feeling of sickness in the heart of you, you would lay down the story
and exclaim, “How real!”
That is what is meant by realism to-day.
Yet somehow or other I prefer my Emily; not because the boy _is_ called
after me—but because, whatever he may be called, he is alive, he is
well, and he kicks his little legs like wind-mills.
Now _that_ is an immortal truth.
VI
THE SABBATH
VI
THE SABBATH
When I was a little boy—younger even than I am now—my father had strict
ideas upon Sabbath behaviour. We might read nothing, I remember, but
what was true. Now, if you come to think of it, that limits your range
of literary entertainment in a terrible way. It drove me to such books
as “Little Willie’s Promise—a True Story” or “What Alice Found—Taken
from Life.”
One Sunday afternoon, perched high in the mulberry-tree, I was found
with a copy of the Saturday’s daily paper. It was smeared with the
bloodstains of many mulberries, whose glorious last moments had been
with me.
“What have you got there?” asked my father from below.
I told him. It was Sunday. My story at least was true.
“Come down at once!” said he.
I descended, finding many more difficulties to overcome than I had
discovered in my ascent.
My father waxed impatient.
“Can’t you get down any quicker than that?” he asked. He had a book on
rose-growing in his hand, which, being quite true, he was taking out on
that glorious afternoon to read and enjoy in the garden.
With all respect, I told him that I did not want to break my neck and I
continued slowly with my laborious descent. When I reached the ground,
he eyed me suspiciously.
“How dare you read the paper on Sunday?” he asked.
“I was only reading the police reports,” said I, humbly; “I thought
they were true.”
He held out his hand expressively. I timidly put forth mine, thinking
he wanted to congratulate me on my taste.
“The paper!” said he, emphatically.
I yielded, without a word.
“Now, if you want to read on Sunday,” said he, “go into the house and
learn the Collect for the third Sunday after Trinity. And never let me
see a boy of your age reading the paper again.”
“Not on week-days?” said I.
“No, never!” he replied, and, as he walked away, he scanned the Stock
Exchange quotations with a stern and unrelenting face.
I do not want to argue about the justice of this, for now that I am a
little older, the after effect, though not what my father expected, has
proved quite admirable. If the newspaper was not true enough to read on
week-days, let alone Sundays, I came to the conclusion that it must be
very full of lies indeed. And all this has been very helpful to me ever
since. I think of it now as I open my daily paper in the morning, and I
thank my father for it from the bottom of my heart. It has saved me a
deal of unnecessary credulity.
I remember, too, that all games—all games but chess—were strictly
forbidden. That also has left an impression on my mind—an ineffaceable
impression about the game of chess. It seems a very stern game to me—a
game rigid in its expression of the truth. The King and Queen are
always real people, moving—far be it from me to allude to Royalty—in
straightened paths; the Queen impulsively, the King in staid dignity,
one step at a time. I always behold the Knight as one, erratic and
Quixotic in all he does; the Bishop swift and to the point, thereby
connecting himself in my mind with the days when the Bishops went out
to war and brought the Grace of God with them on to the battlefield,
rather than with the Bishops of to-day, who keep the Grace of God at
home.
So I think of the game of Chess—the only game we were ever allowed to
play on Sunday—the game my father loved so well above all others.
I don’t know what it is about the observance of the Sabbath, but to me
it seems a beautiful idea, like a beautiful bell; yet a bell that has
been cracked and rings with a strange, false, unmeaning note. No one
seems to be able to get the true tone of it. Heaven knows they ring it
enough. The Church and such followers of the Church as my father are
always pealing its message for the world to hear; yet I wonder how many
people detect in it the sound of that discordant note of hypocrisy.
Nevertheless, there is something grand in that conception of One
creating a vast universe in six days or six ages—whichever you will—and
resting at His ease upon the seventh. Nor is it less grand to work
throughout a common week, making a home, and on the Sabbath to cease
from labour. The whole world is agreed that that day of rest is needed;
but are they to lay down a law that what is rest for one man is rest
for another?
If that is the only way they can think of doing it; if that is the
only interpretation of the word—rest—which they can find, then, so far
as the Sabbath is concerned, we shall be a nation of hypocrites or
lawbreakers for the rest of our days. And of the two, may I be one who
breaks the law. For, do what you will with it, human nature has reached
that development when it insists upon thinking for itself and, one man,
thinking it all out most carefully, will declare that a game of chess
is not an abomination of the Sabbath, while another will read the
police reports in the daily papers because they are true.
Fifty years ago, Charles Kingsley, that strenuous apostle of health,
urged that it was better to play cricket on the Green at Eversley than
stay at home and be a hypocrite—or a gambler, which is much the same
thing. But his was only one honest voice amongst the thousands of
others who have preached a very different gospel to that.
Only a short while ago, at a little tennis club in the suburbs of
London, there came up before the committee the question as to whether
play should not be allowed on Sunday. The club was composed of city
clerks, of members of the Stock Exchange, of men labouring the daily
round to keep together those homes of which both the Church and the
nation are so justly proud.
Every one seemed in favour of it, until the Vicar of the parish rose
and said that seeing there was a high fence all round the ground,
and that the players would be hidden from the sight of the public at
large, he saw no reason why play should not be allowed out of Church
hours—that was to say, from two till six.
“But,” said he, “I must most vehemently protest against any playing of
the game of croquet.”
A member of the committee, one with a lame leg, who was debarred from
tennis, but was known to make his ten hoop break at croquet, asked
immediately for the reason of this protest.
“I work all the week in the city,” said he; “I have no other chance for
playing except late on Saturday and on Sunday. Why should you prevent
croquet?”
“Because,” said the Vicar, “the sound of the croquet balls would reach
the ears of people passing by. And what do you imagine they’d think
if they heard people playing croquet? I make no objection to tennis
because, if played in a gentlemanly way, no one outside need know that
a game was going on—but croquet! You must remember we have to consider
others as well as ourselves.”
“You think it would make them feel envious?” asked the lame man.
“I mean nothing of the kind,” said the Vicar.
“Then what do you imagine they would think?”
“They would realise that the Sabbath—the day of rest—was being broken.”
“Then we have your consent to break it with tennis,” said the Chairman.
“It seems to me,” said the Vicar, “that this discussion is being
carried into the region of absurdity.”
“I quite agree with the Vicar,” said the lame man.
VII
HOUSE TO LET
VII
HOUSE TO LET
If I only knew more about women than I do—if I only knew anything about
them at all—I might be able to understand the vagarious indetermination
of the lady who is contemplating the occupation of a little house quite
close to me here in the country.
But I know nothing about the sex—well, next to nothing. That is as near
to the truth as a man will get on this subject. His next to nothing,
in fact, is next to the truth. And so, with this open confession of
ignorance, I can explain nothing about this lady. I can only tell you
all the funny things she does.
There is this house to let. Well, it is less than a house. An agent,
flourishing his pen over the book of orders to view, would call it a
maisonette—what is more, he would be right. It is a little house—a
little, tiny house. The view from the balcony round the top of it is
beautiful; but from inside, I doubt if you can see anything at all. I
have never been inside, but that is what I imagine.
Now, the strange thing about this lady’s attraction for it is that she
has occupied it once before. There her children were brought up. From
there they were sent out into the world upon that hazardous journey of
fortune: that same journey in quest of the golden apple for which the
three sons have always set forth, ever since the first fairy tale was
written. And so the little house is filled with recollections for her.
She remembers—I have heard her speak of it—the day when Dicky, the
youngest boy, fell out from one of the windows. Not a long fall, but
it was the devil and all to carry him back into the house. She did not
say it was the devil and all. I say it for her, because I know when she
was telling it, that was the way she wanted to put it. But a woman can
look a little phrase like that, which is so much better than saying it.
She remembers also the day when they had nothing in the house to eat
and she, saying such things to her husband as God has given him memory
for the rest of his life, had to go out and scrape together whatever
she could find. It was a cold day. There was snow on the ground. Snow
in the beginning of May! Heaven only knows how she managed. But she
succeeded.
There is that about women. They will get food for their children, even
when famine is in the land, or they will die. I know that much about
them. They have died in Ireland.
Well, all these things she remembers; things which, softened by time,
are no doubt pleasant memories ere this. And yet she cannot make up
her mind. Where she has been since they went away, I do not know.
Travelling, I imagine. But here she is back once more, doubtless
worrying the life out of the house agent, who is continually being
jostled in the balance of thinking he has, then thinking he has not,
let a very doubtful property.
Every morning she comes and looks over the old place. I suppose she
is staying in the neighbourhood. From every side she views it and all
the while she talks to herself. Now, women do this more than you would
think. They do it when they are going to bed at night. They do it when
they are getting up in the morning. It always seems as if there were
some one inside them to whom they must tell the truth, because, I
believe, they are the most truthful beings in the world—to themselves.
Only yesterday, when she thought she was absolutely alone, I heard her
saying—
“You wouldn’t like it, you know, once you were fixed up there again.
It’s out of the way, of course, quiet, but you wouldn’t like it.”
And then, having told herself the truth, she began immediately to
contradict it.
Why they do this is more than I can tell you. The only people who can
tell the truth, they seemingly dislike it more than any one else. A man
loves the truth, lives for it, dies for it, but seldom tells it. With a
woman it is just the opposite, and I cannot for the life of me tell you
why.
“You’d be a fool if you took it,” she said to herself as she went away
to the house agent’s. “You don’t know who you’ll have for neighbours.
They might be disgusting people.”
I followed her to the house agent’s, and this, if you please, was the
first question she put to him—
“What sort of people do you think’ll take the house over the way?”
I pitied the house agent from the bottom of my heart, because how
on earth could he know? Yet upon his answer hung all his chances of
letting. I thought he replied very cleverly.
“They’re sure to be good people,” said he; “we only get the best class
round here.”
And then, just listen to her retort—
“But you can’t tell,” said she. “What’s the good of pretending you
know. It might be a butcher and his family. You couldn’t stop them if
they wanted the house.”
The agent leaned back in his chair, then leaned forward over his desk,
turning over pages and pages of a ledger.
“Well, will you take an order to view this one?” said he. “Same rent—a
little more accommodation.”
“No, I don’t want to see any more,” she replied. “This is the one I
like best.”
“Well, would you like to settle on that?” said the agent. “I’ll write
to the landlord to-night.”
“I’ll let you know to-morrow,” said she.
For three weeks she has gone on just like this.
And it is still to let, that little house in the bowl of my old apple
tree. But every morning she comes just the same and, sitting on the
topmost branch, she chatters to herself incessantly for half an hour,
as starlings and women do—for she is a lady starling. I shall be
curious to know when she makes up her mind, but, knowing nothing about
women and less than nothing about starlings, I cannot say when or what
it will be.
VIII
A SUFFRAGETTE
VIII
A SUFFRAGETTE
She thanked God, she told me, that she had never been married.
She was quite old—well, quite old? Can you ever say that of a woman?
Women are quite old for five years, but that is all. They are quite old
between the ages of thirty-five and forty. Then, if God has given them
a heart and they have taken advantage of the gift, youth comes back
again. It is not the youth under the eyes, perhaps; it is the youth in
the eyes. It is not the youth around the lips; it is the youth of the
words that issue from them.
Between thirty-five and forty a woman is trying to remember her youth
and forget her age. That makes her quite old—quite, quite old. After
that—well, I have said, it rests with God and her.
So Miss Taviner was not quite old. She was quite young. She was
sixty-three. Her eyes twinkled, even when she thanked God for her
spinsterdom.
“You’ve got,” said I, “a poor opinion of men.”
“’Tisn’t my opinion—’tis my mother’s,” said she.
I felt there was nothing to be said to that. It would have been
unseemly on my part—who have only just found my own youth—to disagree
with an opinion of such long standing.
You must understand that Miss Taviner could never have been beautiful.
God may have meant her to be; I don’t know anything about that. I am
only aware how Nature interfered. For when she was young—a child not
more, I think, than six—she was struck by lightning, paralysed for a
time, and, when she recovered, her eyes were at loggerheads. They
looked every way but one.
But I like her little shrivelled face, nevertheless. It is crafty,
perhaps. She looks as if she counts every apple on the trees in her old
garden. Why shouldn’t she? She has a poor opinion of men. Besides, the
apples at Beech House Farm—where her father lived and his father before
him—those apples are part of the slender income by which she manages to
cling to the old home. Who could blame her for counting them? I don’t
even blame her for having the cunning look of it in her eyes.
No—I suppose, though I do like her face, it is because I haven’t got to
love it. Possibly that is why she has so poor an opinion of men. Some
man found that he could not love her face and broke his faith with her.
At least, I thought that then. Some heartless wretch has jilted her, I
thought—taught her to love, and then caught sight of a prettier pair
of eyes. I must admit he need not have been on the lookout for them.
“But,” said I presently, when these ideas had passed away, “don’t you
admit men have their uses?”
“None!” she said emphatically.
“Then why,” I asked, “do you hang up that old top hat of your father’s
on a peg in the kitchen, so that the first tramp, as you open the door
to him, may see it?”
“So that he’ll think I’ve got a man in the house, I suppose,” she
replied.
“That’s why you have a couple of glasses and a whiskey bottle on the
table in the evening?”
“Yes.”
“Then a man is useful,” said I, “as far as his hat is concerned?”
She winked her crooked eyes at me and she said, “Yes, so long as there
isn’t a head inside of it.”
I laughed. “Then really,” I concluded, “you do hate men?”
“I suppose I do,” said she.
“Why?”
I thought I was going to hear of her little romance with its pitiable
ending.
But no, she merely shrugged her shoulders, stuck an old tam-o’-shanter
on her head, and went out to see if the gardener was doing his fair
share of work.
I might never have thought of this again, but it chanced that I bought
from her, amongst her old relics of the family property, a mahogany
box, with brass lock and brass handle. Inlaid, it was, round the edge
of the lid. Quite a handsome thing. She had lost its key. It was locked
and, seeing that she did not want to go to the expense of getting a key
made, she sold it to me.
I got a key made. I opened it. It was empty, but for one thing. There
was a letter at the bottom. It is unquestionable that I had no right
to read it. It is also unquestionable that I did.
“_My dear Miss Taviner,_” it ran, “_these evenings that it is so light
they may be playing cricket on the green. Shall we meet at the Cross
beyond the forge?—Yrs. in haste, Henry Yeoman._”
“That’s the man,” said I to myself. “He was ashamed of being seen with
her even then. No wonder she has a poor opinion of men.” My anger went
out to Henry Yeoman on the spot.
But I did him an injustice. For, inquiring at the forge, which I
happened to pass some days later, I stopped and asked the smith about
him.
“Henry Yeoman,” said he, “why he’s left these parts nigh fifteen years.
He’s gone to live at Reading.”
“Is he married?” I asked.
“Yes; married Miss Taviner.”
“Miss Taviner?”
“Yes; sister of her down at Beech House Farm.”
“Never knew she had a sister,” said I.
“Yes. Oh, she had three; all married, they are.”
“Why did she never marry?” I asked, for then I knew the letter was not
to her.
“Why?” He tapped the anvil with his hammer and he laughed a bass
accompaniment to its ring. “Because no one ’ud ever look at her, I
suppose.”
I saw it then. I saw why she had so poor opinion of men. I saw why she
thanked God she had never married.
No man had ever taught her what love was. No man had ever even jilted
her. No wonder she hated them. No wonder she counted her apples.
IX
BELLWATTLE AND THE LAWS OF NATURE
IX
BELLWATTLE AND THE LAWS OF NATURE
It is not mine to distinguish between the laws of God and the laws of
Nature. This is a distinction peculiar to Bellwattle.
It would be difficult to give precise definition to her conception of
the subtle and imaginary line which divides the two, but, so far as I
can grasp it, it would seem to be this: The laws of God determine those
things which happen despite themselves and to the confusion of all
Bellwattle’s pre-conceived opinions. When, for example, a caterpillar,
in its hazardous struggle for existence, eats into the heart of her
favourite rosebud, that is, for Bellwattle, one of the laws of God.
Now, the laws of Nature are quite different to this. The laws of
Nature—so Bellwattle, I fancy, would tell you—command those things
which happen of their own accord and to the satisfaction of all
Bellwattle’s pre-conceived anticipations. When, for example, a rose
tree bears a thousand blossoms from May to the end of December;
when the peas are ready to pick in the first week in June, and the
delphiniums have grown yet another inch when, every morning, she steps
out into the garden to look at them—these are, for Bellwattle, the
orderly workings of the laws of Nature.
I see her point. I sympathise with her distinction and I wish—oh,
_how_ I wish!—that I could think as she does. For it is a fixed idea
with her. Nothing will shake it. And I have never met any one whose
appreciation of Nature is as great as hers.
Only the other day—so Cruikshank, her husband, tells me—they came
across a wild flower in one of the hedges. In blossom and general
appearance it bore so close a relation to Shepherd’s Needle that at
first sight of it, he dubbed it straight away. On closer examination it
was found that there were no needles; neither could it be Shepherd’s
Purse, for there were no purses.
“Perhaps it’s a Shepherd’s Needle gone wrong?” suggested Bellwattle,
and Cruikshank tells me he left it at that. The sublime conception of
it was beyond the highest reaches of his imagination.
On another occasion, when I had the honour to accompany her on her
walk, we heard the raucous note of a bird from somewhere away in the
meadows.
“I bet you don’t know what that is!” said I, to test her knowledge; but
she answered quite easily—
“It’s a partridge.”
“No,” said I, a little disappointed at her mistake, “that’s a
pheasant.”
“Oh, the same thing,” said Bellwattle, unperturbed.
“Of course; they both begin with a P,” said I.
And then she looked at me out of the corner of her eyes and blinked. I
thank God I did not smile. She would never have believed in me again.
But it is when Bellwattle puts out her gentle hand to help Nature in
her schemes that I think she is most lovable of all. This is the way
with all true women when they love Nature for Nature’s sake. In fact,
it sometimes seems to me, when I watch Bellwattle forestalling God
at every turn, that she is Eve incarnate, the mother of all living.
For to see her in the garden and the country, you would feel that she
almost believes she has suffered the labours of maternity for every
single thing that lives, from the first snowdrop opening its eyes to
the spring to the last little tremulous calf, with its quaking knees,
which the old cow in the farmyard presents to our neighbour over the
way.
“The poor wee mite,” she says, and she gives it the tips of her fingers
with which to ease its toothless gums.
But sometimes, as woman will, she carries this motherdom to excess. You
may aid Nature to a point. Men do it in their pre-eminently practical
way, which has science for the dry heart of it. Watch them pruning
rose trees. I believe they take a positive pleasure in the knife. I am
perfectly sure Bellwattle’s garden would be a forest of briars were
it not that Cruikshank keeps locked within a little drawer a knife
with a handle of horn, which he takes out in the month of March, when
Bellwattle goes to pay a visit to her mother up in town. In fact, the
visit is arranged for that purpose.
“I suppose it has to be done,” she says, packing her trunk. “But it
seems a silly business to me that you should have to cut the arms and
legs off a thing before it can grow properly. They bore roses last
year. Why not this?”
But where Nature needs no aid, there is Bellwattle ready with her
ever-helping hand. She constitutes herself in the capacity of nurse to
all the birds in the garden.
Only this spring a linnet built its nest in the yew tree that grows in
our hedge. In an unwise moment Cruikshank informed her of it. She ran
off at once and counted the eggs. Five there were. She had seen eggs
before, but these were the most beautiful that any bird had ever laid
in its life.
From that moment she became so fussy and excitable that Cruikshank was
at a loss to know what to do with her.
“She’ll drive the bird away,” said Cruikshank to me.
“Well, tell her so,” said I.
“I did.”
“Well?”
“She simply said, ‘The bird must know that I don’t mean to do any
harm.’”
“No doubt she’s right,” said I. “I don’t suppose there’s an animal in
the whole of creation that doesn’t recognise the maternal instinct when
it sees it.”
That was all very well while there were only eggs to be reckoned with.
But when one morning Bellwattle went to the nest and found five black
little heads, like five little Hottentots grown old and grizzled, with
shrivelled tufts of grey hair, there was no containing her.
She clapped her hands. She danced up and down and—
“Oh, the dears!” she cried. “Oh, the little dears! I must give them
something to eat. What will they eat?”
I looked at Cruikshank. I had come round that morning to count his
rosebuds with him—a weakness of his to which he always succumbs. He
tells me it is the only way he can justify his use of the knife. I
looked at him and he looked at me.
“This is going too far,” he whispered. “Can’t we put a stop to it?”
“Leave it to me,” said I, and Bellwattle, hearing our whispers, turned
round and stared at us.
“What is it?” she asked.
“We were talking,” said I.
“Yes, but what about?”
She was fired with suspicion.
“We were wondering the best thing you could feed them with.”
Suspicion fell from her.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Would corn be any good?”
Cruikshank blew his nose.
“A little bit solid,” he said dubiously.
“You can’t do better than give them the same as their mother does,” I
suggested.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Small worms,” I replied, and I watched her face; “those little thin,
red, raw ones.”
She walked away, saying nothing. She hates worms. Well, naturally—every
woman does.
Cruikshank laid an appreciative hand on my shoulder.
“That’s done it,” he said. “I was afraid she’d go worrying about till
she made the poor little beast desert, but that’s done it.”
I was not so sure myself. Therefore it surprised me not at all the next
morning when, arriving unexpectedly in the garden, I came upon her
unawares, carrying at arm’s length two little wriggling worms. There
was an expression on her face which will live in my memory for ever. I
concealed myself behind a tree and watched. I could see nothing, but
this is what I heard—
“Oh, you funny little mites! Bless your little hearts! Here, take
it—take it! Open your mouth, you silly! Not so wide—not so wide. Well,
if you all sit up like that you’ll fall out, you know. Lie down, you
silly little fools; lie down! lie down! Now shut your mouth on it and
you’ll find it. Shut your mouth!”
And so on and so on, till my laughter gave me away.
“Were you listening all the time?” she asked.
I nodded my head.
“So was the mother linnet,” said I, “up in that lilac tree. What do you
think she’ll do now? She’ll think you’ve been trying to kill them.”
“No, she won’t,” said Bellwattle. “I left a big worm on the edge of the
nest for her, so that she’ll know I’ve been feeding them.”
But something worse than that happened. With all this attention paid
to that which by every law of Nature should have been kept a dead
secret, the attention of Bellwattle’s cat was attracted to the spot.
Next morning the nest was found empty and one of those brown little
Hottentots hung dangling in the branches.
Bellwattle came running down the garden, wringing her hands, the tears
glittering in her eyes, her lips quivering as she told us what had
happened.
“That comes of meddling with Nature,” began Cruikshank, but I stopped
him very quickly.
“If you stop her tears and make her angry,” I whispered, “she’ll never
forgive you. Let her cry; it’s the way women learn.”
X
MAY EVE
X
MAY EVE
I was told that some one wanted to see me.
“Who is it?” I asked.
They told me it was an old lady, who would give no name. I inquired of
her appearance. “She is an old lady,” they replied, “and very, very
small.” I think I must have guessed, for I asked no further questions.
I told them to show her in.
If I could only describe to you the way she came into the room! She was
so wee and so tiny. Her eyes sparkled with such brilliancy, she might
have been seven instead of seventy. Then, when she bobbed me a curtsey
as she entered, I could have believed she was a fairy come from the
uttermost ends of the earth to attend a christening.
There was every good reason for my belief, not the least of which was
that it was May Eve. In Ireland, as you know, the folk dare not go out
after dark on this eventful day. The fairies are in the fields, fairies
good and bad, and heaven only knows what you may not come across if you
wander through the boreens or across the hillside when once the evening
has put on her mantle of grey.
Not only will you meet them in the fields, moreover; they come to your
very door and milk they ask of you, and fire and water. Now, except
that she asked for nothing, but rather brought a gift to me, my wee
visitor might have been a fairy come out of the land beyond the edge of
Time; come ten million miles to this old farmhouse which hugs itself so
close to the land in the valley between the hills.
For the moment I felt my heart in my throat. I had added things
together so quickly in my mind that I was sure my belief was right.
She was a fairy. May Eve—the very time of day, when the grey mist is
creeping over the meadows, and the river runs _blip, blip_ between
the reeds—the strange and youthful glitter in her wee brown eyes,
set deep in the hollows of that old and wrinkled face; then last of
all, her bobbing curtsey and the way she smiled at me as though she
had a blessing in her pocket—these were the things I added so swiftly
together in my mind. The result was inevitable. Undoubtedly she was a
fairy. Now see how strange the tricks life plays with you; for, whereas
I had believed in fairies before, I knew now that my belief had been
vain. I had only believed in the idea of them—that was all. I had only
said I believed because I knew I should never see one to contradict the
doubt which still lingered in my heart. That is the way most of us say
our credo.
“I’ve brought you your travelling-rug,” said she, and she bobbed again.
“What travelling-rug?” I asked.
And then, what happened, do you think? I could hardly believe my eyes.
She took from off her arm what seemed at first to me some garment,
lined richly with orange-coloured sateen. My eyes grew wider in wonder
as she laid it down and spread it out upon the floor.
It was a patchwork quilt!
Oh, you never did see such a galaxy of colours in all your life! Blues
and reds, greens, yellows and purples, they all jostled each other for
a place upon that square of orange-coloured sateen. All textures they
were, too; some velvet, some silk, and some brocade. It was as if the
caves of Aladdin had been thrown open to me, and I were allowed just
for one moment to peep within.
But that was not all.
For when I said: “You’ve finished it, then?” I saw to what purpose
that completion had been made. Right in the centre of all those
dazzling patches was a square of purple—purple that the Emperors used
to wear—while worked across in regal letters of gold there were my own
initials.
I stared at them. I went down on my knees, looking close into the
stitches to make sure that there was no mistake. Then I gazed up at her.
“But it’s for me?” said I.
She nodded her head and her whole face was lighted up with pride and
satisfaction. She was so excited, too. Her eyes danced with excitement.
You know the quaint little twisted attitudes that children get into
when they are giving you a present which they have made themselves;
they are half consumed with fear that you are going to laugh at them
and half consumed with pride in their own handiwork. She was just like
that.
Lest you do not know already, I should tell you that I had made her my
pensioner as long as she lives, in order to enable her to leave off
work and make this patchwork quilt whereby she might be remembered
by those who slept beneath it when she had gone to sleep. But I had
thought to myself, surely it will be in the family. I had wondered who
would become the proud possessor of it. Imagine my amazement, then,
when I realised that it was my very own.
“And you’ll think of me when I’m gone, won’t you, sir—when you go to
bed at night?” she said.
“Think of you?” said I. “You may well call it a travelling-rug. I only
have to wrap this round me and, with the mere wish of it, I shall be in
the land of dreams—millions and millions of miles away.”
“P’raps I shall be there, too,” said she, clasping her hands.
“And then we’ll meet,” said I.
She began folding it up with just that care which she had used in the
making of it. She folded it one way.
“It’s nice and warm,” said she.
She doubled it another way.
“Every one of the squares is lined with sateen.”
She redoubled it once more.
“And it’s all padded with cotton wool.”
When she said that, she stood up with her face all beaming with smiles,
and she laid it in my hands.
Then I did what I had wanted to do from the very first moment I saw
her. I took her little face in my hands and I kissed the soft, warm,
wrinkled cheeks.
“When I was very unhappy,” said I, “I used to entertain what is called
a belief in fairies. Now that I know what it is to be happy, I find
them. It’s a very different thing.”
XI
THE FLOWER BEAUTIFUL
XI
THE FLOWER BEAUTIFUL
Limehouse, Plaistow, and the East India Docks—these are places in the
world to wonder about. Yet even there beauty manages to creep in and
grow in a soil where there would seem to be nothing but decay.
There are societies, I believe, which exist in those quarters, whose
endeavour it is to lift the mind of the East End inhabitant to an
appreciation of what the West End knows to be Art. I am sure that all
their intentions are the sincerest in the world. But what is the good
of Art to a dock labourer and his wife?
We have only arrived at Art ourselves after generations and
generations of a knowledge of what is beautiful. So absolutely have
we arrived, moreover, that we care no longer for what is beautiful; we
only care for Art.
That, however, is another question too long to enter into here. But to
teach Art to the East India dock labourer when he knows so little of
beauty, that is a process of putting carts before horses—a reduction to
absurdity which can be seen at once.
Now when I was a journalist—that is to say, when I wrote lines of
words for a paper which paid me so much per line for the number of
lines which the chief sub-editor was good enough to use—I was one day
despatched to the East End to see if there were any stuff—I speak
colloquially—in a poor people’s flower show.
“It may be funny,” said the editor.
“It might be,” said I.
“Well, make it funny,” said he, for I think he caught the note in my
voice.
I pocketed my notebook and set off for the East End. Oh, there were all
sorts of flowers and doubtless it looked the funniest of flower shows
you would ever have seen. For example, the qualification necessary
for exhibition was that your plant had been grown in a pot and on a
window sill. It was a qualification not difficult to fulfil. In all my
wanderings there to find the place, no plot of ground did I see, save a
graveyard around a church. But the only things that grew there were the
stones in memory of the dead; and they, begrimed with soot and dirt,
were sorry flowers to grace a tomb.
You can imagine the pitiful, shrivelled little things that had
struggled to maintain life on the window sills of the houses in those
dingy courts and darksome alleys. Never did I see such an array in all
my life. They would almost, when you thought of country gardens where
the daffodils stand up and brave the April winds, they would almost
have brought the tears to your eyes.
Little geraniums there were, blinking their poor, tired eyes at the
light. One woman brought a plant of sweet pea, which was climbing so
wearily, yet so anxiously out of its little pot of red up a wee thin
stake of wood. You knew it would never reach the light of the heaven it
so yearned to see. The two faint blossoms that it bore were pale, like
fragile slum children. What would I not have given then to wrench it
out of its poor bed and give it to the great generous sweep of an open
field, with a hedge of hawthorn perhaps on which to lean its tired arms.
The woman saw my eyes in its direction and she beamed with conscious
pride.
“It doesn’t look very healthy,” said I.
She gazed at it and then at me with open wonder in her eyes.
“Not ’ealthy?” she said—“why, I’ve never seen none looking better. Look
at that pansy over there—it can’t ’old its ’ead up.”
“But why compare it with the worst one in the show?” I asked—“I didn’t
mean it as a personal criticism when I said it wasn’t healthy. I’m sure
you’ve taken a tremendous amount of care over it.”
“Care!” she exclaimed—“I should just think I ’ave. It’s ’ad all the
scrapin’s off the road in front of our ’ouse.”
I passed on, for the judges were coming round and the young curate just
down from the university has not a proper respect for the Press. He has
probably written for it. Now the young curate of the parish was the
principal judge.
I did not hear what he said about the sweet pea. I had gone further on
to where a woman was standing with her hand affectionately round a pot
from which rose a fine, healthy plant, with rich, deep purple flowers
nestling in the leaves that grew to the very pinnacle of the stem.
There I waited. I wanted to hear what the judges were going to say
about this one. I wanted to hear very much indeed.
This woman, too, seeing my interest in her exhibit, smiled with
generous satisfaction.
“Think I’ve got a chanst, sir?”
“I don’t know,” said I—“it’s fine and strong.”
“And look at all the blossoms,” said she with enthusiasm—“you wouldn’t
believe it, but my son brought that from the country last year when
’e went for the houtin’. ’E brought it back, dragged up almost to
the roots it was—an’ it was in flower then. ‘Put it in a vawse,’ I
says, but my ole man, ’e says—‘Shove it in a bloomin’ pot,’ ’e says,
‘that’ll grow,’ ’e says—‘it’s got roots to it.’ So we puts it in a pot
and sticks it out on a window sill, and there it is. It died down to
nothin’ last winter, but my ole man, ’e wouldn’t let me throw the pot
away. ‘Give it a chanst of the spring,’ ’e says—‘give it a chanst of
the spring.’ And bless my soul, if we didn’t see little bits of green
sticking up through the mould before the beginning of last March.”
“It’s been a constant interest since then?” said I.
“Hinterest! Why my ole man said as I was killin’ it, the way I watered
it and looked after it.”
“And what do you call it?” I asked.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Nobody seems to know. We call
it—William.”
I laughed. “There is a flower called Sweet William,” said I.
“Perhaps that’s it,” she answered, thoughtfully. “But it don’t
smell—leastways, I’ve never smelt nothin’ from it.”
I stood aside as the judges came up. When he saw the plant, standing so
bravely and so healthily, and so beautifully in its bright red pot, the
curate laughed out loud.
“Look here,” said he to one of the other judges, who came up and
laughed as well.
“Do you know what you’ve got here, my good woman?” asked the curate.
She shook her head.
“Well, we can’t give you anything for this—it’s only a common nettle—a
red dead nettle.”
“But it’s a beautiful colour—ain’t it?” said she, with a flame of red
in her face.
“Oh—it’s a beautiful colour, no doubt,” replied the curate easily—“so,
I hope, is every plant that grows in the highways and the byways.”
“Well, then, why shouldn’t it get a prize?” she demanded.
“Because it’s only a common dead nettle,” said the curate, very softly,
turning away wrath.
“But it’s ’ealthier and stronger and finer than any o’ them other
flowers,” said she.
“Quite so—no doubt—you might expect that. These others are cultivated
flowers, you see. This is only a common dead nettle.”
I saw the editor when I returned.
“No stuff worth having,” said I—disconsolately, for I was thinking of
my few short lines.
“Nothing funny at all?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said I, and I told him about the red dead nettle.
“But I think that’s dammed funny,” he said.
“Do you?” I said.
XII
THE FEMININE APPRECIATION OF MATHEMATICS
XII
THE FEMININE APPRECIATION OF MATHEMATICS
If I could approach mathematics with the same spirit as do ninety-eight
women out of a hundred, I might be rather good at them. As it is, my
power of will in face of algebraical figures, in face even of numbers
that exceed the functions of the simplest forms of arithmetic, my power
of will stands aghast. I can do nothing.
Now, ninety-eight women out of a hundred are far more ignorant of the
mere rudiments of mathematics than am I; yet with an instinct which
I would give my soul to possess they can solve problems and carry on
the ordinary business of life with an ability that is little short of
marvellous.
Truly, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and most especially
when that learning is of mathematics. If once you have tried to weigh
hydrogen on an agate-balanced scale, you are for ever unfitted for the
common-or-garden mathematical exigencies of life. Now this is where a
woman has all the pull. The most that she has ever had to calculate the
weight of is a pound of flour or seven and a half pounds of sirloin
already weighed and attested by the butcher. When, then, it comes to
weighing the baby on the scale-pans in the kitchen, she will fling on
the weights with such a degree of confidence that the result is bound
to be correct. You and I, on the other hand, would approach the matter
with such delicacy of touch—believing, and quite rightly, that a baby
was of far more importance than all the immeasurable quantities of
hydrogen in the world—with such delicacy and care should we approach
it that the poor infant would have caught its death of cold and be
in a comatose condition of exhaustion before we had decided that the
scale-pan was clean or the weights were in proper condition to be used.
This smattering of general education is a fatal business. It unfits men
for all the real and useful demands of life.
Only the other day, my friend Cruikshank broke a brass candlestick and
looked up helplessly from the wreck.
“Where on earth can I get any solder from?” said he.
“What’s solder?” asked Bellwattle, his wife.
The question was so direct that, for the moment, it confused him.
“Solder?” he repeated. “Solder? Oh, it’s stuff to mend metal with.”
“I’ll do it with sealing-wax,” said Bellwattle.
Cruikshank laughed and, as he said to me afterwards—
“I gave it to her to do. It’s best to let women learn by experience.
Sealing-wax!” And he laughed knowingly at me. I knew he meant it
kindly, so I laughed with him; but the next day I made inquiries about
the candlestick.
“How did she get on?” I asked.
“By Jove, she’s done it,” said he. “It won’t bear much knocking about,
of course, but it stands as firm as a rock. It’s only a woman,” he
added, “who’d think of mending a brass candlestick with sealing-wax.”
“It’s only a woman who’d succeed,” said I.
But this has nothing to do with mathematics, and it is of mathematics
that I want to speak.
If you have any interest in photography, you know how tricksy a matter
is the exposure of a plate. It is tricksy to you and I will tell you
why. It is because your academic study of the process has taught you
that the two-thousandth part of a second is sufficient exposure in
order to get cloud effects. Conceive, then, how your brain whirls with
figures when you come to take a photograph of an interior or a portrait
of some one sitting in a room. I will not remind you of the tortures
which your mind must suffer, nor the result of such torture when at
last you develop the plate in the dark-room—both are too painful to
speak about. Now, a woman knows nothing about this two-thousandth
part of a second. She would not believe there were such a measurable
fraction of time if you told her. She just exposes the plate; that is
all.
One day I had to get a photograph taken in a hurry. I marched into
a photographer’s in the Strand. There was first a narrow passage,
hung with frames filled with photos of young men and young women
looking their worst in their best. Then I was confronted by a flight
of stairs which I mounted, to find myself in a great big room hung
also with photographs—photographs of family groups, of babies in their
characteristic attitudes as their mothers had given them to the world.
Every conceivable sort of photograph was there, but the room, except
for an American roll-topped desk near the window, was empty.
I coughed, and the head of a young girl—not more than twenty years of
age—popped up above the desk.
“Can Mr. Robinson take my photograph this morning?” I asked.
“Mr. Robinson is not in at present,” she replied.
“I rather wanted my photograph taken in a hurry,” said I.
“Oh, you can have it taken,” said she. “Would you like it done at once?”
“At once, if you please,” I answered.
She rose from her seat behind the roll-topped desk and she walked to
the door.
“Then will you step into the waiting-room?” she asked.
I obeyed. The waiting-room had a mirror and a pair of brushes. When I
thought of the families whose portraits I had seen within—I refrained.
“I shall do,” said I, “as I am.”
After a few moments’ delay there was a knock on the door. I opened it.
There again was the little lady waiting for me.
“Will you step up to the studio, please?” she said, and I received
the impression from her voice of anxious assistants waiting in rows
to receive me, ready to take my features and record them upon a
photographic plate for the benefit of posterity.
Up into the studio, then, I went; a gaunt, great place with
white-blinded windows that stared up to the dull, grey sky. But it was
empty. I looked in vain for the assistants—there were none. And when
she began to wheel the camera into place I stood amazed.
“Are you the whole business of Robinson and Co.?” I asked.
She smiled encouragingly.
“Mr. Robinson is out,” said she.
“I don’t believe there is a Mr. Robinson,” I replied.
She laughed gleefully at that and repeated that there was such a
person, but he was out.
“And does he leave you to the responsibility of the entire premises?” I
asked.
“Yes,” said she.
“What do you do if any one comes into the portrait gallery downstairs
while you’re up here?”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she replied confidently; “they don’t often
come.”
I let her fix that abominable instrument of torture at the back of
my neck. Her fingers tickled me as she did it, but I said nothing. I
was trying in my mind to assess the value of this business of Mr.
Robinson. It was no easy job. I had not got beyond single figures when
she walked back to the camera.
I glanced up at the leaden sky.
“It’s rather dull,” said I; “what exposure are you going to give?”
“Oh, I think once will be enough.”
“Once what?” I asked.
“Just once,” said she.
“But, good heavens!” I exclaimed, and I thought of the two-thousandth
part of a second—“it must be one of something. Is it seconds or minutes
or half-hours or what?”
She burst out laughing.
“I don’t know what it is,” she replied, as if it were the simplest
matter in the world, “only Mr. Robinson says my once is as good as his
twice.”
“Is it?” said I. “As good as his twice? What a splendid once it must
be!”
Now that is what I mean. That is the feminine appreciation of
mathematics. I wish I had it. It may not be of much service on the
office stool, but in a world of men and women it is invaluable.
XIII
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
XIII
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
Some things there are which you may count upon for ever. The fittest
will always survive, despite the million charities to aid the
incompetent; the maternal instinct will always be the deepest human
incentive, no matter who may gibe at the sentiment which clings about
little children.
Now, if it be true that Art is the voice of the Age in which we live;
that the painter paints what the eye of the Age has seen, the singer
sings the songs which the Age has heard, the man of letters writes the
thoughts which have passed through the mind of the Age—if all this is
true, then how strange and unreal an Age this must be.
For if for one moment you chose to consider it, there are but few
painters, few singers, few writers who express the immutable laws of
life. Among writers most of all, perhaps, this is an age which devotes
itself to the unfittest. The physically unfit, the morally unfit, the
socially unfit—these are the characters which fill the pages of those
who write to-day.
The old hero, the man of great strength, of great honour, of
great courage, he no longer exists in literature. I am told he is
old-fashioned, a copy-book individual, a puppet set in motion with no
subtle movements of character, but with wires too plainly seen, worked
by a hand too obviously visible. There is no Art in him, I am told. I
am glad there is not. He would lose all the qualities of heroship for
me if there were.
In times gone by, though, this old-fashioned hero was just as real
a man as is the hero of to-day. In times gone by this hero was not
unnatural, not wanting in character or humanity when he slept with
the maid of his choice, a naked sword between them guarding the
pricelessness of her virginity. But now—to-day—how wanting in character
do you imagine would he be thought for such a deed as that? How
painfully unreal?
Is this the fault of the Age? Or is it the fault of the writer? Is it
that the Age cannot produce a real hero? Or is it that he is there in
numbers in the midst of us and the man of letters has not the clearness
of vision to see him? For it is not the fittest, but the unfittest who
survives in the pages of literature now.
And thus it is also when you find treatment in fiction of that
immutable law, the maternal instinct. If in the novel of to-day
you meet the character of a woman with a child, you may be fairly
confident that it will be shown to you sooner or later in the ensuing
pages how easily she will desert it for the love of some man other than
her husband, or how, loving that man, her soul will be wracked ere she
bids it farewell. But, tortured or not, she will go. No matter how
skilfully she is shown to repent of it later, still she will go.
Now, is that the fault of the Age, or is it the fault of the writer? In
danger or in love, do women desert their children? It may happen that
they do, but that is a very different matter. All that glitters is not
gold—all that happens is not real. Yet it seems to be the choice of
the modern writer to seize upon these isolated happenings, give them a
coating of reality, and offer them to the public as life.
But life is not a narrow business where things just happen and that
is all. Life is the length and breadth of this great universe
where things are, in relation to the whole system of suns and moons
and stars. Now the maternal instinct is a law without which this
wonderfully regulated system would shatter and crumble into a thousand
little pieces.
But no one extols it in this age of ours. Talk of it and you are dubbed
a sentimentalist at once. Write of it and the cheap irony of critics is
heaped upon you. Yet there seems no greater and no grander struggle to
me than when these inevitable laws march through the invading army of
vermin and of parasites to their inevitable end of victory.
The other day I witnessed a most thrilling spectacle: a mother
defending her child from death—a duel where the odds against victory
were legion.
In the hedge that shields my garden from the road there is a thrush’s
nest. I saw her build it. She was very doubtful about me at first;
played all sorts of tricks to deceive me; decoyed my attention away
while her mate was a-building; sent him to distract my mind while she
was putting those finishing touches to the house of which only a woman
knows the secret—and knows it so well.
I think before it was completed she had lost much of her distrust in
me, for I did nothing to disturb her. It was not in my mind to see what
she would do if things happened. I just wanted everything to be—that
was all. And so, after a time, she would hop about the lawn where I was
sitting, taking me silently thereby into her confidence, making me feel
that I was not such an outcast of Nature as she had supposed me to be
at first.
I tried to live up to that as well as I could. Whenever I passed the
nest and saw her uplifted beak, her two watchful eyes gazing alert over
the rim of it, I assumed ignorance at the expense of her thinking what
an unobservant fool I must be. But there were always moments when she
was away from home and I, stealing to the nest, found opportunity for
discovering how things were going on. Five fine blue eggs were laid
at last. I think she must have guessed that I counted them, for one
morning she caught me with my hand in the nest. I slunk away feeling a
sorry sort of fool for my clumsy interference. She flew at once to see
what I had done. I guess the terror that must have filled her heart.
But when she had counted them herself and found her house in order, she
came out on to the lawn and looked at me as though I were one of those
strange enigmas which life sometimes offers to every one of us.
At length one day, when I called and gently put in my hand—leaving my
card, as you might say—the eggs were there no longer. In place of them
was a soft, warm mass like a heap of swan’s-down, palpitating with life.
I met her later on the lawn, when she perked her head up at me and as
good as said:
“I suppose you know I’ve got other things to do now, besides looking
beautiful.”
But I thought she looked splendid. What is more, I told her so, and
it seemed just for the moment as if she understood, as if there came
back into her eyes that look of grateful vanity which she wore last
spring when her mate was wooing her with his songs from the elm tree
across the way. But the next moment she had put all flattery behind her
and was haggling with a worm, not as to price no doubt, but haggling
nevertheless for possession.
Well, the household went on splendidly, until one day I saw my cat
sitting on the path below the nest staring up into the bushes.
“You little devil!” I shouted, and she went galloping down the garden
with a stone trundling at her heels.
I kept a closer watch after that and, one morning, hearing a great
noise as of the songs of many birds while I was at my breakfast, I just
stepped out to see what was happening.
I was held spellbound by what I saw. For there, on the path again
below the nest, sat the cat and two yards from her—scarcely more—stood
my little mother-thrush, her eyes dilated with terror, her feathers
ruffled and swelling on her throat, singing—singing—singing, as though
her heart would burst.
It can only last a moment, I thought. One spring and the cat will have
her. But, no! Before the greatness of that courage, before the glory
of that song, the cat was silenced and made impotent to move. There,
within a few feet of her was her prey. With one swift rush, with one
fell stroke of her velvet paw, she could have laid it low. But she
was up against a law greater than that which nerves the hunter to his
cunning.
For five minutes, with throat swelling and eyes like little pins of
fire, the mother sang her song of fearless maternity. The glorious
notes rang from her in ceaseless trills and tireless cadences. I have
heard a singer at Covent Garden, when the whole house rose as one
person and applauded her to the very roof, but never have I heard such
a song as this, which put to silence the very laws of God that His
greatest law might triumph.
For five minutes she sang and then, with crouching steps, the cat
turned tail and crawled away into the garden. The thrush ceased her
singing and fluttered exhausted up to the nest.
And they write of women deserting their children!
XIV
FROM MY PORTFOLIO
XIV
FROM MY PORTFOLIO
He has just reached his eightieth year. Eighty times—not conscious
perhaps of them all—he has seen the wall-flowers blossom in his old
garden; well-nigh eighty times has he thinned out his lettuces and his
spring onions, pruned his few rose trees, weeded his gravel paths.
Now he is bent with rheumatism; his rounded back and stooping head,
his tremulous knees in their old corduroy breeches, are but sorry
promises of what he was. Yet with what I have been told and what I can
easily imagine, it is plainly that I can see the fine stalwart fellow
he has been. Until the age of seventy-two he was the carrier for our
village. How many journeys he made, fair weather or foul, always up
to the stroke of time, never forgetting the message for this person,
the purchase for that, they will all tell you here in the village. I
know nothing of his life as a carrier. It is of an old man I give you
my picture—an old man awaiting the coming of death with a clear eye and
a sturdy heart, enjoying the last moments of life while he may, and
facing those sorrows and deprivations which come with old age in a way
that many a younger man might learn and profit from.
Only a short time since, his wife departed upon her last journey. The
winter came and snatched her from him just as the first frost nips the
last of the autumn flowers. Her frail white petals drooped and then
they fell. He was left to press them between the leaves of that book of
Life which, with trembling fingers, he still clutched within his hand.
He was too ill to follow her body to its quiet little bed in that
corner of God’s acre where it was made; but I can feel the loneliness
in the heart of him when he turned and turned with wakeful eyes that
night, stretching out his knotted fingers to the empty place beside
him—the place in that bed which had been hers for so many happy years
and was hers no longer.
They thought he would never pull through that winter after his loss;
and indeed he must have fought manfully with that undaunted courage of
a man who clings to life, no matter what misfortune, because it is his
right—his heritage. For imagine the long, sleepless nights which must
have followed the departure of his gentle bed-fellow! Think of those
weary, endless silences which once had been filled by the whisperings
of their voices! For in bed and at night-time, the old people always
whisper. It is as though they were deeply conscious of the invisible
presence of God and His angels. They talk in hushed voices as though
they were in church.
I can hear her saying—
“John.”
“Yes,” I can hear him reply.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes—are you?”
“I am. Isn’t it a windy night?”
“’Tis a fine storm—and I never put in they pea-sticks. I was going to
do ’en to-morrow.”
And then I can hear her little whisper of consolation—
“Maybe they’ll be safe till then. They’re sturdy plants.” At which I
can see him turning over in his bed and passing into one of those short
hours of sleep into which Nature so gently divides the night for the
old people.
Then think of the long and weary silences through which he must have
endured before he grew accustomed to the absence of his bed-fellow.
For there seem to me few things more pathetic yet more beautiful than
two old people who have long passed the passions of youth, sharing
their bed together, with the simplicity and innocence of little
children. I can, too, so readily conceive how dread the terror of the
night becomes when one of them is taken and the other left. I can hear
the sounds at night that frighten, the storms that rattle the tiles on
the old roof making the one who is left behind stretch out his groping
hand for the trembling touch of another hand in vain.
Yet through all this he survived. Cruelly though his heart had been
dealt with, he still retained the whole spirit of courage in his soul.
With all its chill winds and bitter frosts, he braved out that winter
and two years have passed now since his wife died.
I see him nearly every day in his garden, walking up and down the
paths, picking out a weed here, a weed there. Two walking-sticks he
has to help him on his journeys. They are called simply, number one and
number two. And when it is a fine morning, with the sun riding fiercely
in a cloudless sky, his daughter will say to him—
“You need only take number one to-day.”
So he takes number one and a look comes into those child’s eyes of his
as though he would say—
“Ah—you see I’m not done for yet. There’s many an old fellow of eighty
can’t get along without two sticks to help him.”
One day, too, this summer, I found him working with a bill-hook in his
garden. The grass had grown up high under the quick-set hedge on one of
the paths. He was clearing it all away.
“Must keep the little place tidy, sir,” he said, with a bright twinkle
in his eye. “They grasses do grow up so quick there’d be no seeing
the path at all.” Then with little suppressed grunts of his breath
to every swing of the bill-hook, he went on steadily with his work,
leaning heavily upon number one with the other hand.
Rather strenuous labour you would think for an old man of eighty to be
doing. But as he worked, I saw that all the stems of the grass had been
cut for him beforehand with a scythe. He was only sweeping it together
into heaps with the aid of a bill-hook. So long as it was a bill-hook
it seemed man’s labour to him.
I try sometimes to find out what he thinks about life and its swiftly
approaching end. But he is very reticent to speak of it—so unlike our
little serving-maid, who takes her evenings out alone, and when I asked
her why she did not prefer company, replied—
“I like to think, sir.”
“What of?” said I.
“Of life and the night,” said she.
But if he thinks of life and the night, as indeed I am sure he must, he
tells his thoughts to no one. It was only once, when I was praising the
scent and the show of his glorious wall-flowers, that he said to me—
“I like to think they’re the best this year that I’ve ever had. I grow
them all from our own seed, sir. I save it up myself every year. And I
like to think this year that they’re the very best, because you know,
sir, I may not see them again.”
I tried to imagine what would be the state of my own mind, if I thought
I should never see wall-flowers again. I wondered could I say it with
such courage, such resignation as he.
To never see wall-flowers again! It seems in a nonsensical, childish
way to me to sum up the whole tragedy—if tragedy there really be—in
Death. It seems, moreover, to give just that little stroke of the
brush, that little line of the pen in completion of this thumb-nail
portrait of mine. An old man in an old garden that he loves, telling
himself that his wall-flowers are the best that year of all—telling
himself bravely night after night when he goes to bed, morning after
morning when he rises to the new day—which is one more day nearer the
end—telling himself that they are the best this year of all, because he
may not see them any more.
To never see wall-flowers again!
XV
AN OLD STRING BONNET
XV
AN OLD STRING BONNET
I care not what it is, so long as it be old; but if an object has
passed through other hands than mine, it gathers an indefinable charm
about it. Old china, old cups and saucers, whether they be ugly or
beautiful, are priceless by reason of that faint murmuring of other
lives which clings around them. In the mere tinkling of the china as it
is brought in upon the tray, I can hear a thousand conversations and
gossipings coming dimly to my ears out of the wealth of years which is
heaped upon them.
For this reason would I always use the old china which it is my good
fortune to possess. A breakfast-table, a tea-table spread with china
which can tell you nothing than that it has but lately come from the
grimy potteries, makes poor company to sit down with. Yet let it be but
Spode, or Worcester, or Lowestoft, and every silence that falls upon
you is filled with the whisperings of these priceless companions.
I have no sympathy with the collector who locks his china away because
it is rare and worth so much in pounds and shillings and pence. He is
no more than a gaoler, incarcerating in an eternal prison the very best
friends he has, and just, if you please, because they are his.
What if there is the risk of their being broken! A rivet here, a
rivet there will make them speak again. I have a Spode milk-jug with
forty-five rivets in it and it is more eloquent to me than all the
modern china you could find, however perfect it may be. In fact, I
would sooner have a piece that has been mended. It shows that in those
long-ago days, where all romance lies hiding for us now, it shows that
they cared for their treasures and would not let them be discarded
because they happened upon evil times. I have also an old blue and
white tea-pot with a silver spout. A dealer sniffed at it the other day.
“May have been good once,” said he.
“’Tis better now,” said I. “So would you and I be if we’d been through
the wars.”
“Do you mean to say you’d prefer me with a wooden arm?” he asked.
“I would,” said I. “You’d be a better man. You couldn’t grasp so much.”
But the other day I found a treasure. Miss B——, the old spinster
lady in whose farm I have my little dwelling, is by way of being the
reincarnation of a jackdaw. She has cupboards and chests in every room
in which lie hidden a thousand old things which have been in her family
for years. Yesterday, in turning out an old drawer, I came across a
quaint little contrivance that looked like a string bag, only it was
beautifully made in three parts, all composed of a wonderful lace-work
of fine string and knitted together, each one by a delicate stitching
of white horsehair.
I brought it out into the kitchen, tenderly in my hand.
“Whatever is this?” I asked.
She took it in her fingers and looked at it for a moment, then,
inconsequently, she laid it down upon the kitchen table.
“That—” said she, “that was my great, great grandmother’s bonnet. She
wore it up till the time she died.”
“Why, it’s nearly two hundred years old!” I exclaimed.
“If it’s a day,” said she.
I gazed at it for some moments. Then suddenly it seemed to move, to
raise itself from the table. Another instant and it was spread out,
decked with a tiny piece of pink ribbon, on the head of an old lady—but
oh, so old! Her silvery white hair thrust out in little curls and
coils through the mesh of the string, and there she was, with a great
broad skirt and big puff sleeves bobbing me a curtsey before my very
eyes.
I turned to Miss B——
“Do you see?” I asked.
“See what?” said she.
“Your great, great grandmother.”
“I never saw her in my life,” she replied.
“But under the string bonnet!” I exclaimed.
“Goodness! That ’ud fall to pieces if any one tried to put it on now.
It’s no good to me. You can have it if you like.”
Then I understood why she could not see her great, great grandmother,
and, with a feeling of compassion for her loneliness, I took the old
lady into my arms. Miss B—— went to the sink to peel some potatoes.
“You’re perfectly beautiful,” I whispered, and her old face wrinkled
all over with smiles.
“They used to tell me that when I was a girl,” said she.
“You’re more beautiful now,” said I.
“What’s that you’re saying?” asked Miss B—— over her shoulder.
“What I should have said,” said I, “if I’d lived two hundred years
ago.”
XVI
THE NEW MALADY
XVI
THE NEW MALADY
In every age there is a new disease—there is a new malady—a strange
sickness. The whole army of medical science goes out to meet it and
there is pitched a battle wherein lives are sacrificed, honour made and
lost. But in the end the glorious banner of medical skill is generally
carried triumphant from the field. Some old foes truly there are who
are not conquered yet, with whom a guerilla warfare is continuously
being waged. Never can they be brought into the open field; never can
they be come upon at close quarters. Sometimes in a skirmish they are
routed and put to flight; yet ever they return, lessened in numbers, no
doubt, weakened in strength, but still a marauding enemy to mankind.
Then apart from these, there is that new malady, which, with its stern
inevitability, the age always brings amidst its retinue of civilisation.
It would seem, notwithstanding the dictum of the Bab Ballad-maker, that
they are not always blessings which follow in Civilisation’s train.
One disease after another has come amongst us from out the ranks of
civilisation. And now appears the latest of all, seizing upon its
victims under the very walls of that fortress of medical science.
It is the disease of bearing children, the disease of making life.
We all know how science with its anæsthetics, with its deftly made
instruments and its consummate skill, is attacking the enemy from every
quarter. Yet the fatality of the sickness is steadily growing. More
women die in childbirth now than ever fell its victims in the days
when the services of a common mid-wife were all that were at their
disposal.
It is terrible sometimes to think how rapidly this most natural of
all functions—since upon it hangs the existence of all people in the
world—it is terrible to think how rapidly it is shaping into the
awesome features of a disease. Women are as ashamed of its conditions
now as they would be if smallpox had pitted their delicate skins.
They speak of it as of some dreadful operation—which indeed it has
become—and, instead of glorying over a possession which they alone
command, they will talk of it as a curse which, suffering alone, they
should be given compensation for. They ask for the vote! Great God!
As if the vote could compensate them for the loss of bearing children
as the God of nature meant they should be borne! As if any form of
compensation could ease such a loss as that!
Success and civilisation—these are the two subtle poisons from the
effects of which we are all suffering. Nothing fails like success!
Nothing degrades so much as civilisation!
A little while ago a woman who had given birth to a fine child told me
quite frankly that she herself was not going to feed it.
“Do you mean suckle it?” said I.
She did not like that word and she shuddered.
“You object to the use of the word?” I suggested.
“Is it _quite_ nice?” she asked.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Words are only ugly,” said I, “when they express ugly deeds. I can
understand if you find the deed ugly you don’t like the word.”
She answered that she did not mind the thing itself. “You see,” said
she, “it’s quite impossible for me to do it. We’ve been asked up—my
husband and I—to Chatsworth to meet the King, and it would be foolish
to lose such an opportunity—wouldn’t it? I can’t go up like this, so I
must have a sort of operation.”
“So you’ve made up your mind?” said I.
She screwed up her eyes as her conscience faltered in her breast.
“Practically,” she replied.
“Well, if not quite,” I suggested, “write to the King, and ask him
whether he would sooner meet you at Chatsworth or have a stalwart son
given to the country.”
She told me I made the most absurd remarks she had ever heard from any
one and she walked away. “Besides,” said she, over her shoulder, “it’s
a daughter.”
I found her name amongst those invited to Chatsworth to meet the King.
I saw her picture in a photograph of the Chatsworth group and she
looked beautiful. Her figure was that of a child who had never known
maternity.
There are traitors even in the camp of medical science, thought I.
Nothing degrades science so much as the march of civilisation—no social
woman fails so utterly as when she succeeds in meeting the King.
I have a friend, in the tiny chintz parlour of whose cottage in the
country a certain collection of prints adorn the walls. For the most
part they are steel engravings, valuable enough in their way. But it is
the subject common to them all, rather than the intrinsic value of each
picture, which has persuaded my friend to their collection. One and
all, with the tenderest treatment you can imagine, they portray a baby
feeding at the gentle breast of its mother. No other pictures in the
room are there but these, and there must at least be a fair dozen of
them. You cannot fail but notice them. The similarity of their subject
alone would force itself upon your mind.
Yet, would you believe it, the ladies who come there to call upon my
friend’s wife, regard them with horror and alarm. As their eyes fall
upon them, they turn sharply away, only to be met with yet another
of those improper pictures upon an opposite wall. With far greater
equanimity and even interest would they look upon a series of Hogarth’s
prints. The vicar of the parish, too, was alarmed. He asked my friend
whether he did not think that such pictures did harm.
“Of course I know,” said he, “it is a natural function and is all right
in its proper place. I don’t mean to say that it would do harm to you
or to me, of course—we’re old enough to discriminate. But younger
people are apt to look at these things in a different light.”
“Do you know that as a fact?” asked my friend quietly.
Now, the vicar was a truthful man, who had read that the devil is the
father of all liars. He held his head thoughtfully for a moment.
“It is what I imagine would be the case,” said he. “On which account I
always disapprove of those pictures which, what you might say, expose
the body of a woman in the so-called interests of Art. With a man and
his wife—if I may say so—such things are different; but to make a show
of a woman’s nakedness, that is to me a form of prostitution at which
honestly I shudder every time it comes my way.”
“I see—I see your point,” said my friend. “If there is to be
prostitution, let it be that of the wife. I see your point. But why
call marriage a sacrament? And why solemnise it in a church? I should
have thought the meat-market had been a better place.”
Great heavens! No wonder the disease is spreading! No wonder is it
that women approach the hour of deliverance in fear and trembling,
for neither do they fit themselves for it, nor are they proud of the
birthright which is theirs alone. For the sake of appearances, because
they are not well enough off, because of inconvenience, they will give
up all they possess for the mess of pottage. Civilisation indeed has
made a strange place of the world. There are few men and women left in
it now.
Now and again you may run across a true mother, but all the rest of
women that you meet are only fit to be called by a name that is indeed
too ugly to write.
A true woman I heard of only the other day. She was brought to her
bed of childbirth. In the room there was that still hush, the hush
of awe when out of the “nowhere into here” the something which is
life is about to be conjured out of the void of nothingness which is
death. For long, trembling moments all was still. The faint whispers
and muffled sounds only made the quietness yet more potent. And then,
suddenly, out of the silence, came the shrill living, trumpet-cry of a
new voice—the voice of a little child.
The woman stretched her arms and smiled, as if in that cry she had
heard the voice of God.
“You must lie still,” they whispered in her ear—“there is yet another
child.”
“Thank God!” she moaned, and the silence fell round them once more.
XVII
BELLWATTLE AND THE DIGNITY OF MEN
XVII
BELLWATTLE AND THE DIGNITY OF MEN
We were all sitting out in the garden having tea under the nut
trees—Bellwattle, Cruikshank and I. They use the old Spode
tea-service—apple green and gold and black—whenever tea is taken out
of doors, and I would give anything to describe to you the pictures
that rise in my mind with the sight of that quaint old tea-service,
the smell of the sweetbriars and the scent of the stocks. They are
indescribable, those pictures. No one will ever paint them to my
satisfaction, neither with colours nor with words. They are composed
with such historical accuracy, are so redolent of their time, that it
would need somebody with a memory reaching over one hundred and fifty
years to trace them as they appear to me. Now, if my memory reaches
over five minutes it is doing well—and many there are the same as I.
The characters I see are arrayed in costumes so befitting to their
period, they speak of things so faithful to their day, that no man,
unless he had lived in the eighteenth century, could possibly reproduce
them. I see their dainty costumes—I hear their quaint speech, but not
one jot or one tittle of it all could I put down upon paper. Yet I know
those pictures are true as true can be.
Why is this? Is there a memory within us which harks back to lives
we have lived before? Is it by the same reason we feel that certain
incidents have come to us again out of the far-off past? I was
pondering over it all that afternoon, when suddenly Bellwattle broke
the silence which surrounded us.
“Why were elephants called elephants?” she asked.
Cruikshank—of whom, if it cannot be said that he knows the woman in his
wife, at least knows her queer little habits—passed his cup without
amazement for more tea. But I—well, it took my breath away.
“Whatever made you ask that?” I inquired.
She shrugged her shoulders as eloquently as she could, being occupied
with Cruikshank’s third cup of tea.
“I don’t know,” she replied—“Who called them elephants, anyhow?”
To this second question, Cruikshank was as ready as if he were at
Sunday school.
“Adam,” said he. “Adam named all the beasts and he called them
elephants.”
“But why elephants?” asked Bellwattle.
Cruikshank looked at me across the little garden table. There was an
appeal in his eyes, as though he would say, “Go on—I’ve answered mine.
It’s your turn now. Don’t let her think we don’t know.”
For you must understand that, in their dealings with women, there is
a certain freemasonry amongst men. If by nature their sex is debarred
from the greatest of all functions, they must at least steal dignity
by the assumption of great wisdom. No man may ever admit ignorance to
a woman. So long as her questions have nothing to do with instinct, he
will answer them, whether or no he tells her the greatest balderdash
you ever heard. All men in their vows of masonry must swear to do
this. We should be in a sorry way if women did not look up to us for
knowledge.
When then I received this secret sign from Cruikshank, I did the best
thing I could for the sex—I answered at a hazard.
“He called it an elephant,” said I, “because the impression he received
of its size may have suggested that word to his mind. He may for
example have been trodden upon by one of those huge brutes—in which
case,” said I, “the impression would have been a vivid one.”
“If one of them trod on me, it wouldn’t suggest the word elephant,”
said Bellwattle. “I should think of squash.”
“Probably you would,” said Cruikshank; “but then you’re not Adam.” By
which I think he meant to convey the mental superiority of his sex.
Therefore—“She might be Eve,” said I.
Bellwattle closed one eye and looked at me.
I met her gaze steadily and then, as suddenly, she put another question
to us.
“Did Adam name everything?”
“Every single thing,” said Cruikshank.
“All the insects?”
“Every blessed one.”
“Why did he call it Daddy Long Legs, then?”
Cruikshank seized the opportunity.
“That was what its long legs suggested to him.”
“But why Daddy?” said Bellwattle very quickly.
Cruikshank dipped into his third cup of tea, drowning all possible
answer.
“Why Daddy?” she repeated.
“Because,” said I, “Adam was the father of all living.”
For the moment Cruikshank forgot his table manners and choked. It
took a great deal of serious assurance on our part then to convince
Bellwattle that we were in earnest. For we were in earnest. No man is
so serious, or so put upon his mettle as when a woman bows to him for
knowledge. There comes that look into his face as well I remember
would creep into the face of the master when I was at school. No doubt
it is the same now. The vanity of men does not alter in ten years, or
in ten thousand for that matter.
I can see now the German master—that is to say the stolid Englishman
who taught us German—I can see him now reading out a sentence for us to
translate into the language.
“My heart,” read he, most solemnly, “my heart is in the Highlands—my
heart is not here.”
And there was such pathos, such a tone of exile in his voice, that I
was prompted to ask him whether, under the circumstances, he could give
his proper attention to the class.
“Might we not shut up our books,” said I—“straight away?”
The look that came into his face then was the look—exaggerated a little
perhaps—which comes into the faces of most men when the dignity of
their great wisdom is upset. Cruikshank and I, then, were struggling
for our dignity against the fire of Bellwattle’s questions. It was no
good talking about the evolution of language to her. She would never
have understood a word of it. Now, when a man tells a woman anything
which she does not understand, she is just as likely to think him a
consummate fool. And a man will always be a fool rather than be thought
one.
We were trying, therefore, to answer Bellwattle as she would have
answered herself. In other words, we were making fools of ourselves in
order that Bellwattle should think us wise.
It was here that Cruikshank tempted providence. Doubtless he thought we
were getting on so well that we could afford to be generous with our
information, for in quite an uncalled-for way he volunteered to tell
her more.
“Is there anything else,” said he, “that you want to know?”
She nodded her head and around the corners of her lips I believe I
caught the suspicion of a smile.
“If Adam called it a cow,” she began——
“He did,” interrupted Cruikshank. “In those days it probably made that
sort of noise.”
“Then why,” said Bellwattle, giving him never a moment to retract, “why
do they call it a _vache_ in France?”
We all looked at each other—I at Cruikshank, Cruikshank at me, and
Bellwattle alternately at both of us.
After a pregnant pause, Cruikshank began to temporise.
“That’s very like a woman,” said he—“you’re going into another issue
altogether.”
“Now,” said I, “you’re coming to Bible history.”
“Yes, that’s Bible history,” repeated Cruikshank, “you’re going back
to the Tower of Babel.”
“Is that where they wanted to get up to Heaven?” she asked.
We nodded our heads emphatically.
“And it all smashed up, and they began talking like a crowd of
tourists?”
“Something like that,” we agreed.
“Then, don’t you see,” went on Cruikshank, finding his feet once more.
“Then they all separated, went into different countries, and when they
saw a cow in France they called it _vache_—it’s quite simple.”
“Oh, yes, I see that part of it,” said Bellwattle. You have only to say
to a woman—and moreover be it in the proper tone of voice—that a thing
is quite simple and she will see it through and through. I have known
Bellwattle understand a proposition of Euclid by telling her it was
quite simple.
As I say, “If that point is the centre of this circle, all lines drawn
from that point to the circumference must be equal; that’s quite
simple, isn’t it?”
And she has replied, “Oh—quite—I see that—but who says it’s the centre?”
If I say Euclid, she then asks me if I believe everything which people
tell me.
In this manner she saw Cruikshank’s point about the people in France
calling a cow _vache_. But after seeing it, she was silent for a long
time. She was giving it due consideration. I knew that another question
was to come. At last she looked up.
“But can you explain,” said she, “how they happened to hit upon the
same animal? I know _vache_ means cow, but how did the people in France
know that it should be that particular animal that they were to call
_vache_? They might have called a pig _vache_, and then we should all
have been topsy-turvy.”
I ran my fingers through my hair.
“My God!” said I——
“It’s no good swearing,” said Bellwattle, “I can see you don’t know.”
XVIII
THE NIGHT THE POPE DIED
XVIII
THE NIGHT THE POPE DIED
It comes back into my mind now, as an echo that is lost among the
hills, that night in Ardmore in Ireland, that night when they heard the
Pope was dead. I can hear the low, deep note of the sea, monotonous
and even as the beating of a heavy drum when the waves rolled up the
boat cove, or leapt upon the rocks that crouch to meet the sea beneath
the Holy Well. I can see the clouds, great banks of grey, as though a
furnace were smouldering below the horizon, I can see them hanging in
sullen wet masses, hanging low over the white crests that were breaking
away by Helvic Head. I can see the dank, dark coils of seaweed lying,
like the hair of women that are drowned, along the dim curved line of
the strand. And around the first head, where the bay spreads wide into
the great Atlantic, the sound of a rushing wind, muted by the hills,
dimly reaches my ears.
It seems fitting that when any great catastrophe falls upon the
trembling little people of this world there should be sounded an
ominous note—a discord struck upon that great orchestra of the
elements. It is the only true accompaniment to the sorrows of mankind,
when the thunder bursts, the lightning rends the raiment of the sky and
the winds play wildly on their shrillest instruments.
There was no thunder, no lightning that night, but all across the bay
and round the headlands you might have felt the despairing sense of
foreboding, the heavy hour before a storm, when the very ground seems
angry beneath your feet.
Such was the night in Ardmore when they heard the Pope was dead.
In one moment the whole Roman Catholic world had been robbed of its
father; the great Church of Christ was without its head on earth. From
that moment and for the anxious days to come they were as orphans,
knowing not where to turn. The Pope was dead. But there was none to cry
in the market-place, there was none to stand upon the chapel steps and
shout, “Long live the Pope!”
The Pope was dead. There was no Pope.
You must have seen the silent, questioning faces to have known what
such a loss could mean. Around the counters in the public-houses the
fishermen sat, afraid to drink. The women crept into their cottages and
shut the doors. Presently little flickers of light glowed from each
window—candle flames trembling as the draughts of wind caught their
feeble glow.
It was as though the spirit of that old aristocrat, with his death-like
head and piercing eyes, were making its way to Heaven through the
little street of Ardmore, and these few feeble glimmers were set out,
tiny beacons, to point his road.
For an hour they were burning before there came from the village
courthouse the sounds of instruments being blown, all those weird,
unearthly noises which tell you that a village band is about to play.
In ten minutes they were ready—the public-houses were empty. In ten
minutes they were putting their instruments to their lips; their cheeks
were swelling with the first ready breath to start. A little crowd of
boys and girls were surrounding them ready to march by their sides; and
then, with a one—two—three, they began. The little solemn, serious
crowd strode forth.
Up by the post-office they went, round by the Protestant Church, along
down Coffee Lane to where stands the seawall hung with its festoons of
red-brown nets. Then through the main street they marched and round
again the same route as before.
And ever as they marched, like the band of an army playing the death
march at the funeral of their chief, they played the same grim tune—the
grimmest tune at such a time I think I have ever heard—“Good-bye,
Dolly, I must leave you.” It was the only tune they knew.
After the second round of their journey, the playing ceased while
the players gained their breath. In silence then, they tramped over
the same ground, the little crowd, eager for the music again, still
following at their heels.
When they reached the top of Coffee Lane once more, where the road runs
up to meet the Holy Well and wanders from there in a thin straggling
path around the wild cliff-heads, there came an elderly woman and a
child out of the darkness.
Seven miles they had walked around that dangerous path from the little
fishing hamlet of Whiting Bay—seven miles over a way where a goat must
choose its steps, where at moments the sheer cliff rushes down four
hundred feet to meet the sea—seven miles in that chill darkness with
never a lantern’s light to guide their feet—seven miles with hearts
throbbing, hope rising and falling, whispering a word to each other now
and then, always straining on—seven miles just to learn the truth.
As they came out of the shadows, the woman stopped. The
clarionet-player was wetting his lips, fitting his fingers with
infinite care upon the notes of his instrument. She caught his arm
before he could raise it to his mouth.
“What is ut?” she asked.
“Shure, the Pope’s dead,” he whispered back.
And then, with its one—two—three once more, the band struck up again.
The woman and the child stood there silently under a cottage window,
the light of the burning candle within making pin-points in their eyes,
while in their ears echoed and re-echoed the words, “The Pope is dead,”
mingling with the refrain, “Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you.”
XIX
ART
XIX
ART
It was explained to me the other day, the meaning of this elusive
little word of three letters. All my pre-conceived opinions were dashed
to the ground and, in the space of half an hour, I was taught the
modern appreciation of the meaning of that word—Art.
It chanced I wanted a copy of that picture by Furze, “Diana of the
Uplands”—Furze whom the gods loved or envied, I don’t know which. I
wanted a copy of it to hang in my bedroom in a little farmhouse in
the country. I wanted to hang it near my bed so that when I woke of a
morning, I could start straight away across the Uplands, feeling the
generous give of the heather beneath my feet, tasting the freshening
draught of wind in my nostrils, taking into my limbs the energy of
those hounds ever ready to strain away from their leash and leave their
mistress a speck upon a dim horizon.
It chanced that I wanted all that—which is not a little. But these are
the real good things of life which are so seldom bought because they
are so cheap. A small print-seller’s in Regent Street was good enough
for me.
I walked in. On the threshold I was met by a little serving-maid with a
chubby red face and a brand-new green apron.
“Yes?” said she.
It opened the conversation excellently.
“I want a coloured print of ‘Diana of the Uplands,’” said I.
She hurried to a portfolio and began turning over coloured prints at
an incredible speed. Before she had found it, she looked up.
“Will you have it plain?” she asked, “or with a B.A.M.?”
“A B.A.M.?” said I. I could not describe to you the effect of those
three mysterious letters. It sounded almost improper. “You ought not to
say things like that to me,” I continued solemnly. “Supposing I said
that you were a V.P.G.”
She became at a loss between confusion and amusement.
“I forgot,” she said, apologetically. “I’m new here, and that’s what we
call them. It means British Art Mount.”
At that moment there came another serving-maid in a green apron.
“What is it you want, sir?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m being attended to, thank you,” I replied.
“Yes, but this young lady’s new to the shop,” she said; “she’s not
quite used to serving yet.”
“She’s doing very well indeed,” said I. “She’s already nearly persuaded
me to buy a thing I don’t want—a thing I don’t even know the meaning
of.”
The little girl with the chubby cheeks wriggled her shoulders with
delight.
“I asked him if he wanted a B.A.M.,” she explained.
The other looked quite shocked.
“You know I’ve told you not to say that,” she said. “You’d better go up
to Miss Nelson, she wants you upstairs.”
The little maid departed. I was left with her more elderly and more
experienced sister in trade. In a moment she had discovered the picture
in question and had laid it out for my approval. I did approve; and
then she asked me if I wanted it framed.
“If you do framing here, I shall be very glad,” said I.
“Then what sort of frame would you like?” she asked.
I hesitated. I was trying to see it in my mind’s eye on that bedroom
wall; see it when the sun was pouring in through the open window;
when the rain was pattering against the panes, and the sky was grey.
Therefore, while I made up my mind—just, perhaps, to conceal from her
the fact that I could be in doubt about such a matter—I asked her what
she would suggest.
She drew herself up, conscious of the state of importance which she had
attained with my question.
“Well,” she said, and her head hung thoughtfully on one side—“that
depends on what room it’s for. Is it for the dining-room or the
drawing-room?”
Now what possessed me, I do not know; but when I thought of that little
farmhouse in the valley between the Uplands, the words dining-room and
drawing-room sounded ridiculous. There is just a sitting-room—and
a small sitting-room—that is all. This dining-room and drawing-room
seemed nonsensical, and what with one thing and another it put me in a
nonsensical mood.
“’Tis for the cook’s bedroom,” said I.
If only you had seen her face! It fell like a stone over a cliff and,
what is more, it never seemed to reach the bottom of that expression of
bewilderment.
“Oh,” she replied—“I see. Well, then, I’m sure I couldn’t advise you.
Tastes differ—don’t they?”
“So I’ve heard,” said I. “But I wish you would advise me, all the
same. I’m quite ignorant about these things. I’m only a farmer. I’ve
just come up to London for the day and I’ve been given this commission
for—well, she’s more than the cook—she’s the housekeeper. She didn’t
tell me anything about the frame. What frame would you suggest? I
thought a nice rosewood one; but you know much better about these sort
of things than I do.”
“A rosewood one won’t be bad,” said she, in a quaint little tone of
voice that gently patronised me. “A rosewood one’ll do,” she repeated;
“but it’s not Art.”
That phrase had an electrical sound to me; and when I say electrical, I
mean, beside the shock of it, something which neither you nor I nor any
of us understand.
“Why isn’t it Art?” I asked quickly. “You mustn’t think me foolish,”
I added, “but really I suppose I’m what you call a country bumpkin; I
know nothing about these things. Why isn’t it Art?”
“Just——it isn’t,” she replied, and she took down a sample of black
moulding and a sample of gold; then she laid a sample of rosewood on
one side of the picture. “There,” she said, “that’s your cook’s taste.”
She did not quite like to call it mine. Then she laid the other two
samples on the other sides of the print—“and that’s Art.”
I looked at the picture, then I looked at her. Then I looked back at
the picture again.
“But how do you know it’s Art?” said I.
She pulled herself up still straighter and she answered, with all the
confidence in the world—
“Because I’ve been taught—that’s why. Because I’ve been educated to
it. I haven’t spent five years here amongst all these pictures without
learning what’s Art and what isn’t.”
“And now you know?” said I.
She nodded her head heavily with wisdom.
“But are you sure you’ve been taught right?” I went on. “How are you to
know that the people who taught you knew?”
“’Cos they’ve been in the business all their lives,” she replied.
“’Cos they’ve found out what the public like and they give it to them.
It’s like one person learning music on a grand piano and another
learning music on a cheap cottage piano. Do you mean to tell me that
the one as learns on the grand piano isn’t going to be a better
musician than the one as learns on the cottage?”
“It’s more likely that they’d be a better judge of pianos,” said I.
She told me I was talking silly and which frame would I have.
“I’m trying not to talk silly,” I assured her. “I mean every word I
say, only I haven’t been educated as you have. You must remember that,
and make allowances. I only said that about the piano because I knew a
lady who had a satinwood Blüthner grand piano, and she never played on
it from one day to another, so that she did not even know what a good
piano was, and much less did she know about music.”
“I wish she’d give it to me,” said the little serving-maid.
“I wish she would,” said I; “then perhaps you’d admit that there was
something in what I said, after all. But, joking aside, if you’ve been
taught what is Art and what isn’t, couldn’t you teach me? I love the
country. I think the fields of corn that grow up on my land every year
are beautiful. And when I see them getting ripe and being gathered,
then going out to feed the whole world—you here in the cities, who
don’t know the gold of a ripening field of corn—every single one of
you, all fed from those wonderful fields that have waves like the sea
when the winds blow across them—things like that I know about—things
like that I appreciate.”
“Oh—well—that’s Nature,” said she. “We were talking about Art. Art’s
holdin’ the mirror up to Nature—see.”
“Then what’s the matter with the mirror?” I asked.
“What mirror?”
“The mirror of Art?”
“Why there’s nothing the matter with it.”
“Well—I don’t know,” said I, “but it seems to me as if so many people
have been taught to look into it, that it has become dulled with their
breath and won’t reflect anything now.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“I don’t believe I know myself,” I replied. “I haven’t been taught like
you have.”
“Well—which frame would you like?” she asked a little testily.
“I’m afraid my housekeeper’ll be annoyed if I don’t take the rosewood
one,” said I.
XX
THE VALUE OF IDLENESS
XX
THE VALUE OF IDLENESS
“If you want to be quiet,” said my friend, “you had better go and sit
up in the old mill.”
I acquiesced at once.
“Just give me a table and a chair,” said I. “I shall be quite
comfortable.”
“Are you going to write?” he asked.
I nodded my head.
“What?”
“An essay.”
“On what?”
“The Value of Idleness.”
“You’ll do that well,” said he, and he told the gardener to take up to
the mill all that I required.
So here am I, writing the Value of Idleness in the little oak-beamed
loft of an old mill.
To do nothing is to be receptive of everything. Idleness of the body
alone will serve you not at all. It is only when the mind—but to follow
the mood, to understand the drift of this philosophy of idleness, you
must see, as I see it, this old white mill in which I sit and write.
Last night, as we walked out in the garden, the moon was in her
chariot, whirling in a mad race through the heavens. In and out of a
thousand clouds she rode recklessly.
She carries news, thought I, and were she the daughter of Nimshi, she
could not drive more furiously.
And there, under her shifting light, with great arms raised appealingly
into the wind, stood the old wind-mill, just at the end of the little
red-brick path which runs through an avenue of gnarled apple trees.
I touched my friend’s arm and pointed.
“She’s very beautiful,” said I.
“She’s very old,” said he.
Then I suddenly saw in her the figure of a patient woman, who has given
up her youth, appealing with passionate arms to God to grant her rest.
Another moment and there came a faint moaning sigh falling upon my
ears—a sigh like the fluttering of an autumn leaf that eddies slowly to
the ground.
“What is that?” I asked.
“The wind-mill,” said my friend. “She’s crying to be set free, to have
her arms unloosed.”
As he said that, I saw her as a tired woman no longer. She became
majestic in her agony then. So it seemed to me must the women in
Siberia cry at night with faces turned, and hands stretched forth
towards their native Russia.
“How long has she been idle?” I inquired.
“Oh—many, many years,” said he.
It was this which made me think of writing the Value of Idleness. So
here am I, writing my essay on Idleness in the little oak-beamed loft
of an old mill.
You cannot think how silent it is. I feel away and above the world.
From the wee square window between the beams I can see the miller’s
cottage with its broad sloping roof of old red tiles, leaning down
until it nearly touches the ground. But beyond that, on one side,
stretches the whole weald of Kent and, on the other, lie the Romney
marshes spreading forth to meet the sea. And there is the sea—that
faint, far margin of blue—a chaplet upon the smooth, broad forehead of
the world.
Yet silent and still as it all is, I can nevertheless hear voices.
Upon the great oak shaft, the tireless vertebra of this goddess of the
wind, there are two initials carved by some patient hand. L.B. are the
letters cut, and following them comes the date—1790. There is a voice
to be heard from that, if you do but listen well. I can see one of
those young millers who, when never a leaf was rustling on the trees
and the air was still in a breathless calm, I can see him sitting there
in a moment of idleness, carving out his initials and the date in deep,
bold characters. Then saying aloud to himself, “Maybe there’ll be some
as’ll read that in a hundred years, and wonder who be I.”
I can hear the incisions of his knife as he cut into the stern hard
oak, the little silences, the little grunts of his breath as he
laboured over each letter. No—for all its stillness, there are voices
in this old mill. Up the oak ladder that leads through the ceiling to
another floor I can just see the great heavy wheel that turned the
shaft. It is grey even now with the dust of flour and, as its sharp
teeth gleam down at me out of the darkness, the echoes of those
rumbling sounds when the wind was high and the sails were racing round,
comes faintly to my ears like thunder afar off.
So here am I, in the midst of these silent voices of the mill—here am
I, writing an essay on the Value of Idleness.
“Idleness of the body,” I had begun, “will serve you not at all. It is
only when the mind is yielding to the drug of laziness as well, that
your ears are attuned to the silent voices and you can speak——”
What was that?
A sudden clatter, a beating of sudden wings around my head!
Only a bat. I watch it as it circles round the old loft. The evening is
beginning to fall; I see the cows being driven home along the road. A
soft greyness is wrapping its fine web about the world and this little
creature is venturing forth from its hiding-place before the day is
yet quite dead.
What a wonderful house to live in—this old, old mill! I scarcely wonder
at the beauty and simplicity of the “Lettres de mon Moulin” as I sit
here with the upper half of the creaking door wide open, and the far
hills stretching out to sleep as the night draws round about them.
But now, as the grey light grows deeper and twilight hangs upon a frail
thread ere it drops into the lap of darkness; now, as though it were a
herald of the night to come, a wind springs up across the land. I hear
it as its first whispers begin to tell their secrets in the corners
and the crevices. Yet it whispers not for long. Soon, with a loud,
insistent voice, it is crying its importunate passion to the mill. But
she is chained. The fetters cling unmercifully to her arms. She cannot
move. Again and again the wind envelops her in its embrace, but she
makes no answer to its passion. Only now and again there comes her
faint, despairing cry—the cry of a woman in pain—the cry of a woman in
prison. I feel so sorely tempted to set her free, just to see her great
generous arms sweeping in a joyous abandonment of life before the wind
she loves so well.
And here am I, in this old, old silent mill, writing an essay on the
Value of Idleness.
Night is on the verge now. The words run into one another upon the
paper. It is so dark that my pen wanders from the faint ruled line and
sets out on its own account across the dim grey page.
At last comes the voice of my friend far below.
“Have you finished your idleness yet?”
“It’s finished,” say I with a sense of loss of the moments that have
been mine—mine and this dear, sad woman’s in prison. I bolt the doors
and come down.
“Come and read it to me now,” says he.
And I read it all.
* * * * *
“But there’s nothing about idleness,” he said. “Where’s the Value of
Idleness?”
“Here,” said I, and I threw the papers across to him. “It’s all
Idleness. To do nothing is to be receptive of everything. I’ve been
doing nothing.”
XXI
THE SPIRIT OF COMPETITION
XXI
THE SPIRIT OF COMPETITION
Not a few are there to applaud this spirit of competition, this modern
endeavour to do things well, not because they are worth doing, but from
the desire to do them better than other people.
Yet it is a canker that eats its way into the heart of everything.
Bellwattle, in her happiest mood of distinction, would call it one of
the laws of God. But whether it be a law of God or of Nature; whether,
in fact, it be a law at all and not simply one of these fungoid growths
of civilisation, it is a deceptive matter whichever way you look at it.
You would imagine, whether you were Jesuit or not, that the end would
justify the means in such a question as this. You might believe that,
so long as the thing were done well, it would matter little, if at
all, the motive which prompted its well-doing. Yet this is just where
the subtle poison of it lurks. For it is not of necessity doing a
thing well, to do it better than any one else. The moment you begin
to work like this, you create a false standard, lowering the value of
everything you do. It is not the spirit of charity to give more than
your next door neighbour. That is the spirit of competition. The spirit
of charity it is to give the last penny you can spare. The widow’s mite
is charity. The millionaire’s thousand is bombast.
But this confusion of terms—this confusion of motives is so growing
into the language we speak that words, which once were so priceless,
are become like weapons worn out and blunted. There is but little edge
left to any words now. They will cut nothing.
And so this spirit of competition is a fetish to-day. We do not speak
of having done a thing as well as we can do it, but of having done it
better than this man or that.
“I bet you,” says the actor, “I could play that part better than the
man who plays it now.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” says the politician, “that the speech I made
last Friday wasn’t as good as Disraeli at his best?”
“That last book of mine,” says the writer, “was nearly as good as ‘The
Old Curiosity Shop.’ I think myself that the death-scene was better in
a way.”
Ah! but if we only did say these things aloud, instead of thinking them
in silence. For ’tis only in silence now—as they would understand it in
Ireland—that we say what we really mean.
So is it that there creeps this spirit of working by comparison into
the soul and tissue of everything we do. Yet you would think, would you
not, that the Church had kept herself free of it? But the Church is
more eaten away with the spirit of competition than is many a humble
labourer, driven to earn his living wage by making his work better than
the rest.
Take this story for what it is worth; apply it as you will. It has only
one meaning for me.
In Ireland, they call the wandering beggars, who live an itinerant
existence, living from one town to another—they call them tinkers. A
certain tinker woman, then, came into the city of Cork. Down one of the
quays, seeking the scraps that fall in these places, dragging three
wretched children at the frayed hem of her skirt, she was seen by a
Protestant vicar.
Shifting one bare foot behind the other, she bobbed him a curtesy.
“For the love an’ honour av God, yeer riv’rance, give a poor ’ooman
a copper, that the Almighty blessin’s av God may discind on ye, yeer
riv’rance. Oh, sure, God Almighty give ye grace.”
The Vicar stopped.
“Where do you come from?” he asked.
“I’m after walkin’ all the ways from Macroon, yeer riv’rance—an’ I in
me feet.”
She held up a bare blistered foot, at the sight of which the Vicar
shudderingly closed his eyes.
“Where’s your husband?” he inquired.
“Me husband, yeer riv’rance? Shure, glory be, I haven’t had a sight or
a sound av him these two years. ’Twas the day Ginnet’s circus was in
Dingarvin, an’ he along wid ’em clanin’ the horses, and faith that was
the last I saw av him, good or bad. I’m thinkin’ he’s gone foreign—he
has indeed.”
“Why don’t you go to a priest? He’s the person to help you—not me. I’m
a Protestant clergyman.”
“Shure, I know that yeer riv’rance—an’ why would I be goin’
to a preyst, an’ I wid me three little children here—the poor
darlin’s—they’ve had divil a bit to eat this whole day.”
The competitive instincts of the Vicar cried aloud with a resonant
voice in his ear.
“Do you mean to say they haven’t been brought up in the Roman Catholic
Church?” he asked quickly.
“They have not indeed. Shure, what good would that be doin’ them?”
“Haven’t they been baptised at all into any Church?”
“They have not.”
The Vicar felt in his pocket and produced a sixpence.
“Get them something to eat,” said he, “and then come and see me. I
shudder when I think they haven’t been baptised. Have you?”
“I was when I was a child,” said she, “but I haven’t been to Mass these
fifteen years. Glory be to God, what’ud I be doin’ at Mass when I might
be gettin’ charity from a grand gintleman like yeerself?”
“My poor woman,” said the Vicar, “it was Christ’s wish that we should
help the poor. I’m thinking, too, of the hereafter of those poor little
children of yours. What hope of salvation do you think there is for
them if they have never been baptised?”
“If ’tis as difficult in this world as it is to get a bite or a sup,
’tis a hard thing indeed. But what good would I be getting to baptise
’em?”
“If you let them come to my church and be baptised, I’ll see that you
won’t be forgotten.”
“Will yeer riv’rance give me something the way I cud be goin’ on with?”
“I will, of course.”
“An’ how much?”
“I’ll give you five shillings, my poor woman. You can get a week’s
lodging and food with that.”
“Oh—shure I’d want five shillings for each wan of them,” she replied
quickly.
The Vicar paused. The tone of this bargaining jarred upon his ears;
but yet, as he thought of it—three little souls saved—three little
souls caught from the grasp of the Roman Church—three more names upon
his baptismal register. And only fifteen shillings! It was money nobly
spent, honourably set aside for the great interest and reward hereafter.
“I’ll give you fifteen shillings,” said he, “if you bring them to the
church to-morrow morning to be baptised.”
She clasped her hands in ecstasy.
“May the Almighty God give ye the blessings of his Holy Name, and may
all the saints be wid ye in the hour of need. Faith, I niver met a
finer Christian or a grander gintleman in all me life.”
She caught her children round her and told them the great things that
were in store for them. With a warm feeling that the day had not passed
in vain, the Vicar hurried away.
Directly he was out of sight, the woman made her way to the presbytery
of the first Roman Catholic church she could find.
“I want to see the preyst,” said she, when they opened the door to her
knocking.
They looked at her ragged clothes. It was with difficulty that she
gained an audience.
“Go round into the chapel,” they said, “and Father —— will be with you
in a minute.”
She plunged quickly into her story directly he came.
“Indeed, he was a nice gintleman,” she concluded, “and ’twas fifteen
shillings he offered me if I’d bring the three of them to the church
to-morrow morning.”
She gazed down at them and they gazed up at her. In some vague way they
realised that they were under discussion. Their little mouths were open
in wonder.
“’Tis a disgraceful thing, indeed!” said the priest in wrath, “to
think ye’d go and sell the souls of yeer own children to one of those
Protestant fellas who’d only be too glad the way they could be counting
three more names in their Church. I’m ashamed of ye—I am indeed! If I
give ye twelve shillings now, will ye bring them here to me?”
“Oh—glory be to God, Father—shure that’s only four shillings for each
wan of the pore t’ings. I thought ’twas the way ye’d have offered me
a poond at least to save the pore creatures the way they wouldn’t be
havin’ their souls damned.”
“Yeer a disgraceful woman,” said he, “to barter the souls of yeer
children like that. I’ll give ye seventeen shillings, and I won’t give
ye a penny more.”
She clasped her hands again and the tears rolled down her cheeks.
“The blessing av God and av the Blessed Mother be wid ye,” she cried.
“Ye’ve saved the souls of three pore creatures this blessed day.”
XXII
BELLWATTLE ON THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS
XXII
BELLWATTLE ON THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS
I have already been at some pains in a few of these pages to give an
idea of the feminine appreciation of mathematics. Undoubtedly it is
more practical than that of many an eminent mathematician. For let it
at once be understood that the first function of a higher mathematician
is to express himself in terms of mathematics, just as an artist
expresses himself in the colours he lays upon his canvas, or a musician
by the little black and white dots he writes between and through the
lines.
“Nobody”—so a scientist once said to me—“nobody seems to understand
this. They have never learnt the language we talk in and they fancy
that we only fit our place in the universe so long as we are useful. If
I were to talk to you now of the things I am doing in my laboratory,
using the terms and the technicalities that I use there, you’d
probably think I was endeavouring to be scientifically brilliant in
my conversation, stringing together all the most exaggerated words to
get an effect which you could not understand; whereas, in reality, I
should be talking the most ordinary commonplaces which even the boy
who cleans out the vessels and the flasks can probably understand. Let
a man invent a talking machine, or a calculating machine, and they
call him a great scientist. Good heavens! If you knew how the real
scientists and the real mathematicians despise him. Why, I’ve seen a
mathematician express the soul in himself so absolutely by the solution
of an abstruse problem, that he has cried with joy like a child—like
an artist when he has finished his masterpiece, a writer when he has
ended his book.”
“May I never burst into tears, if ever I write a book,” said I.
“Well—you know what I mean,” said he.
And I suppose I did know. Utility is the prostitution of most things
as well as science and mathematics. But that is just where women are
more practical mathematicians than men. I have never known a woman
set out to express herself in mathematics yet. What is more, I pray
God, most fervently, I never shall. She will employ the wildest means
of expression in the world, but nothing so wild or incoherent as
mathematics.
I try to conceive a woman in a fit of jealousy sitting down to express
her emotions through the medium of the binomial theorem—which I must
tell you I know to be a method of expanding X and Y, bracketed to the
Nth power, to an infinite series of powers—I try to conceive her doing
that, but my conception always fails. Far more readily can I see her
inviting to tea the creature who is the cause of her jealousy, and
evincing the sweetest friendship for her. Now that is expression, if
you like, bracketed, moreover, without any necessity for your binomial
theorem, to the Nth power, and expanded to an infinite expression of
femininity.
To give you just the simplest example of this matter of the
practicality of women in mathematics, I must tell you that Cruikshank
and I the other evening were recalling our prowess at Euclid; setting
each other problems to prove—well, you know the routine of the
propositions of Euclid.
In the midst of darning some socks and, having listened to us in
silence for at least an hour, Bellwattle looked up.
“Was Euclid mad?” she asked, quite seriously.
There was something in the nature of a ricochet in that question. It
touched not only Euclid, for whom we have infinite respect, but also
ourselves, for whom we have more.
“The sanest person that ever lived,” said Cruikshank, shortly.
“Then why did he waste his time inventing all that rubbish? What’s the
good of it, anyhow?”
I put away my pencil with which from memory I had just been drawing the
diagram for the fourth proposition of the second book.
“It develops,” I answered, “the reasoning power in the human animal—a
not unworthy or wholly unnecessary purpose.”
She darned a few stitches in silence.
“Has it ever done any good besides that?” she inquired presently.
“Well,” said Cruikshank, “it teaches you, for example, how, without
measuring and purely by the light of reason, to construct an
equilateral triangle on a given finite straight line.”
Bellwattle laid down her sock with the knob of wood inside it and she
looked at both of us as though we were creatures from another world.
“And what in the name of goodness,” said she, “is an
equi—whatever-you-call-it triangle?”
Cruikshank went on with his explanation quite cheerily. On this
proposition he was so sure of himself that confidence was actually
glowing in his face.
“Well,” said he, “you know what a triangle is, don’t you?”
She nodded her head promisingly.
“One of those things they sometimes play in bands.”
The look of confidence dropped heavily from Cruikshank’s face; but I
seized the opportunity. She understood. At least she had grasped the
shape of it. It mattered not at all that in her mind its functions were
to play a tune. She appreciated the shape of it. That served its end.
“You’re quite right,” said I quickly. “They have it in an orchestra. It
has three sides to it—hasn’t it?”
She nodded her head vivaciously.
“Yes, and two little curly bits at the top where they tie the string on
to hang it up by.”
“My God!” said Cruikshank in despair.
But I acceded her the little curly bits. She had grasped the shape of a
triangle.
“Well, try and forget the curly bits,” said I. “They have three
sides—haven’t they?”
She acquiesced.
“Like this,” I went on hurriedly, and, dragging out my pencil again, I
drew a triangle on a piece of paper.
“That’s it,” said she; “but they don’t meet at the top.”
“Some do,” I replied; “the ones that Euclid made did.”
“Well, go on,” she said, with greater interest. “What’s an
equitriangle?”
“An equilateral triangle,” said Cruikshank, now stepping in when I
had done all the hard work for him, “is a triangle which has all its
sides of equal length. That side,”—he pointed to my drawing—“that side
and that side all equal. Now Euclid’ll show you,” he continued, “how
to construct an equilateral triangle on a given finite straight line.
You needn’t measure anything. You only want a compass to make a couple
of circles, and he’ll prove to your reason that all the lines of that
triangle are one and the same length as this line you see on the paper
now.”
He turned to me.
“Lend me a ha’penny,” said he.
I gave him the only one I had and he set to work to draw the most
beautiful circles, though they had but little relation to A as their
centre and B as their circumference, which were the letters he had
written at each end of his given finite straight line.
“Nevertheless, that’ll do,” said he.
And then, forthwith, he began to prove it to her.
I went out to get myself a cigar in the dining-room, and while there,
cutting off the end of it and smiling gently to myself as I did so, I
heard the voice of Cruikshank raised in the passion of despair.
“My God! my dear child,” I heard him say. “I proved those two were
equal because they both came from the centre of this circle—B.F.G. to
the circumference. You don’t remember anything.”
I lit my cigar with a trembling hand. Then I walked to the window
of the dining-room and looked out into the garden. There were the
tom-tits pecking away at the cocoa-nut shell which Bellwattle had hung
up with such infinite trouble; there were the kittens, lapping from a
saucer of milk as Bellwattle and their mother had taught them; there
were the sweet peas in great walls of colour with the old pieces of
red flannel still clinging to the pea-sticks, those same pieces of
flannel which Bellwattle had tied to keep off the birds when the shoots
were young and green; there was the little robin which Bellwattle fed
every afternoon at tea-time; there, in fact, were all the signs of
Bellwattle’s beautiful and wonderful and practical utility.
I came back into the other room at the sound of Cruikshank’s voice as
he called me.
“She sees it!” he exclaimed in an ecstasy. “She understands it all
right. I made it clear, didn’t I, Bellwattle?”
“Oh, quite,” said she. “I understand it now right enough. But I never
knew Euclid made instruments for bands.”
Cruikshank tore up his piece of paper and flung it in the grate.
So you see, if she really knew, I’ve no doubt she’d return to question
Euclid’s sanity once more. I feel inclined to question it myself, but
then that is because I know he did not make instruments for bands. He
only expressed himself—that was all.
XXIII
THE MYSTERY OF THE VOTE
XXIII
THE MYSTERY OF THE VOTE
I never knew how really splendid a possession was this of the vote
until the last election. It is no wonder to me now that women throw
dignity to the four winds of heaven, leaving it to chance and the grace
of God whether it ever blows back to them again. It is no wonder to me
that, for the moment, they can forget their glorious heritage in order
to obtain this mysterious joy of recording their vote on a little slip
of paper in the secrecy of the ballot-box.
As a mystery—and all mysteries are power—it had never appealed to me.
As a means of urging the laws of the country in such direction as one
was pleased to consider for that country’s good, it did once seem to
me to be invaluable. I know by now what a hopeless fallacy that is.
But at that time, nursing a political conviction that Home Rule would
be good for Ireland as a people, much as I am led to believe food is
good to a starving man, or a sense of religion to a drifting woman, I
listened to the eloquent appeal of a canvasser for a Unionist candidate.
When he had finished telling me much more than either of us knew about
Tariff Reform, and had built such a Navy before my eyes as would have
frightened the whole German Government and any single English ratepayer
out of their wits, I asked him what the Unionist candidate felt about
Home Rule.
“Home Rule?” said he, carefully—“You approve of Home Rule?”
I walked gently and easily into the canvasser’s trap.
“You don’t denationalise a country,” said I, “because you conquer it.
You can’t cut the soul out of Ireland any more than you can wash a
nigger white. You can only boycott it. You can only paint a nigger. But
boycotting won’t starve the soul of any nation. If it can’t get food
for itself from the nation’s stores, it will still live, feeding from
the country-side on the wild herb of endurance. But there is that which
you can do. You _can_ boycott it.”
“And you think that Home Rule will encourage the development of the
Irish people?” said he.
I admitted that the idea had occurred to me.
“Well, Mr. —— is quite of your way of thinking,” he replied.
“He would support it with his vote in the House?” said I.
“Most assuredly!” he declared.
“I shall vote for Mr. ——,” said I.
And so I should, had I not gone to one of his meetings in the Town
Hall. He, too, spoke eloquently about Tariff Reform and a Navy that
would keep our country what it was; but in the midst of it, a cockney
voice endeavoured to heckle him from the back of the hall.
“’Ow about ’Ome Rule?” shouted the voice.
The Unionist candidate had been heckled before.
“How about it?” he asked sharply, like the crack of a pistol.
“Are you going to let the Roman Catholics get the ’old in Ireland?”
“And make them a menace to England, too—do you think it’s likely?”
replied the candidate.
I walked away. “The vote,” said I to myself, “the vote is only a
catchpenny title for a popular game. It would be much better to gamble
than vote. You might get something for your money if you backed the
right man with a shilling; but you get nothing for backing him with
your vote. In future,” said I, “I shall bet.”
Yet only a little while afterwards I was to learn what a glorious thing
the vote is.
In my village there is an amiable labourer with that cast of
countenance upon which, as on the possessions of his great country, the
sun never sets. And with it all, he has that placidity of manner, that
evenness of gait which suggest that he is always going to or coming
from a service at his chapel.
No one would ever dream of consulting him upon anything, though,
indeed, I once did ask him the name of a certain plant.
“There be some as call it the Deadly shade,” said he, “and some as call
it the Nightly shade, but I don’t know rightly which it be.”
When later on, for my own foolish amusement, I said I had heard it was
called the Deadly shade, he replied in precisely the same fashion.
I tried him once more, by saying that I had looked up a book on the
subject and found it to be the Nightly shade. Again he replied, word
for word, as before.
At last, a few weeks later, I came to him and said—
“You know we were all wrong about that plant. I find at South
Kensington Museum that the proper name for it is the Deadly Nightshade.”
And what do you think he replied? “There be some,” said he, “as call it
the Deadly shade, and some as call it the Nightly shade, but I don’t
know rightly which it be.”
Now that man’s wife had no respect for him, and truly I’m not
surprised. I found out, too, that he knew it—it would not, of course,
be a difficult fact to ascertain—and I felt sorry for him.
And then one day—the day before the polling in our village—all my pity
for him was ended. I met him on the road, carrying home his bag of
tools.
“Well,” said I, “are you going to vote to-morrow?”
His face broadened with a beaming smile.
“I am that,” said he.
“Who are you going to vote for?” I asked.
A cunning look crept into his little twinkling eyes, and he said—
“Ah—that’s telling.”
I admitted that there was that to it and asked him to tell me.
He shook his head.
“I keeps that to myself,” said he. “We’re not supposed to tell who we
vote for. All they votes is counted secret.”
“Do you mean to say you don’t tell anybody?” I asked.
“No,” he replied—“I don’t tell none.”
“But you tell your wife,” said I.
He shook his head again, and his smile was broader and his eyes more
cunning than ever.
“Surely she wants to know,” I exclaimed.
“Ah—she may want to know, but that ain’t my tellin’ her—is it?”
Then I suddenly realised what a glorious weapon he possessed. A weapon
which, when everything else—even intelligence—failed, would make him
master in his own house.
“That must give you a splendid sense of importance in your own home,”
said I—“Don’t they think you’re a fine fellow?”
“P’raps they do.”
“And all because you’ve got the mystery of a vote.”
“I can’t think of no other reason,” said he.
So whenever the question of giving women the vote is raised, I can
think, too, of no other reason for their wanting it. A woman will bow
her head before a mystery when all sense of worship has left her. It
is this which gives her so much respect for the priesthood; it is this
perhaps which gives her her desire for the vote.
XXIV
SHIP’S LOGS
XXIV
SHIP’S LOGS
There is a yard by the river-side in London—opposite Lambeth or
somewhere thereabouts, I think it must be—where you may come so close
in touch with Romance as will set your fancy afire and transport you
thousands of miles away upon the far-off seas of the Orient.
You may talk in disbelieving tones of wishing-rings, of seven-leagued
boots and magic carpets, counting them as fairy tales, food only
for the minds of children; but they are after all only the poetic
materialisation of those same subtle things in life which give wings
to our own imagination, or bring to eyes tired with reality the gentle
sleep of a day dream.
Nearly every one must know the place I write of. It is where they break
up into logs the timber of those ships which have had their day—the
ships that have ridden fearless and safe through a thousand storms,
that have set forth so hopefully into the dim horizon of the unknown
and evaded to the last the grim, grasping fingers of the hungry sea.
And there you will see their death masks, those silent figureheads
which, for so many nights and so many days with untiring, ever-watchful
eyes have faced the mystery of the deep waters unafraid. There is
something pathetic—there is something majestic, too—about those
expressionless faces. They seem so wooden and so foolish when first you
look at them; but as your fancy sets its wings, as your ears become
attuned to the inwardness that can be found in all things, however
material, you will catch the sound of dim, faint voices that have a
thousand tales of the sea to tell, a thousand yarns to spin, a thousand
adventures to relate.
Nothing is silent in this world. There is only deafness.
It has always appealed to me as the most noble of human conceptions,
that burial of the Viking lord. The grandeur of it is its simplicity.
There is a fine spectacular element in it, too, but never a trace of
bombast. The modern polished oak coffin with its gaudy brass fittings,
the super-ornate hearse, the prancing black stallions, the butchery
of a thousand graceful flowers—all this is bombast if you wish. It no
more speaks of death than speaks the fat figure of Britannia on the top
of the highest circus car of England. Funerals to-day have lost all
the grandeur of simplicity. But that riding forth in a burning ship,
stretched out with folded hands upon the deck his feet had paced so
oft; riding forth towards that far horizon which his eyes had ever
scanned, there is a generous nobility in that form of burial. You can
imagine no haggling with an undertaker over the funeral about this.
Here was no cutting down of the prices, saving a little on the coffin
here, there a little on the hearse.
No—this was the Viking’s own ship—the most priceless possession that he
had. Can you not see it plainly, with sails set, speeding forth upon
its last voyage—the last voyage for both of them? And then, as the
lapping, leaping flames catch hold upon the bellied canvas, I can see
her settling down in the swinging cradle of the waves. I can see the
dense column of smoke mingling with and veiling the tongues of orange
flame, until she becomes like a little Altar set out upon a vast sea,
offering up its sacrifice of a human soul to the ever-implacable gods.
Now every time you burn a ship’s log you attend a Viking’s burial. In
those flames of green and gold, of orange, purple and blue, there is
to be found, if you will use but the eyes for it, all the romance,
all the spirit and colour of that majestic human sacrifice—the burial
of a Viking lord. As you sit through the long evenings, while the
rain is beating in sudden, whipping gusts upon the streaming window
pane and the drops fall spitting and hissing down the chimney into
the fire below, then the burning of a ship’s log is company enough
for any one. With every spurt of flame as the tar oozes out from the
sodden wood, and the water, still clinging in the tenacious timber,
bubbles and boils, you can distinguish but faintly the stirring voice
of Romance telling of thrilling enterprise and of great adventure.
There are few sailors can spin a yarn so much to your liking. Never
was there a pirate ship so fleet or so bold; there were never escapes
so miraculous, or battles so stern, as you can see when in those
long-drawn evenings you sit alone in the unlighted parlour and watch a
ship’s log burning on the fire.
Pay no heed to them when they tell you the green flames come from
copper, the blue from lead, the pale purple from potassium. The
chemist’s laboratory has its own romance, but it shares nothing in
common with the high seas of imagination upon which you are riding
now. Let the green flames come from copper! They are the emeralds, the
treasure of the Orient to you. Let the blue flames come from lead,
the pale purple from potassium! In your eyes as you sit there in that
darkened room, with the flame-light flickering upon the ceiling and
the shadows creeping near to listen to it all, they are the blue sash
around the waist, the purple ’kerchief about the head of the bravest
and the most bloodthirsty pirate that ever stepped.
At all times a fire is a companion. Yet set but a ship’s log upon the
flames and I warrant you will lose yourself and all about you; lose
yourself until the last light flickers, the last red ember falls, and
the good ship that has borne you so safely over a thousand seas sinks
down into the grey ashes of majestic burial.
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