Theylived in a flat on the fifth floor, facing a park on one side, and, on the other, through the branches of an elm tree, another block of flats as lofty as their own. It was very pleasant living up so high, where they were not disturbed by noises, scents, or the sight of other people—except such people as themselves. For, quite unconsciously, they had long found out that it was best not to be obliged to see, or hear, or smell anything that made them feel uncomfortable. In this respect they were not remarkable; nor was their adoption of such an attitude to life unnatural. So will little Arctic animals grow fur that is very thick and white, or pigeons have heads so small and breast feathers so absurdly thick that sportsmen in despairhave been known to shoot them in the tail. They were indeed, in some respects not unlike pigeons, a well-covered and personable couple. In one respect they differed from these birds—not having wings, they never soared. But they were kindly folk, good to each other, very healthy, doing their duty in the station to which they had been called, and their three children, a boy and two little daughters, were everything that could be wished for. And had the world been made up entirely of themselves, their like, and progeny, it would—one felt—have been Utopia.
At eight o’clock each morning, lying in their beds with a little pot of tea between them, they read their letters, selecting first—by that mysterious instinct which makes men keep what is best until the end—those which looked as if they indicated the existence of another side of life. Having glanced at these, they would remark that Such-and-such seemed a deserving sort of charity; that So-and-so, they were afraid, was hopeless; and itwas only yesterday that this subscription had been paid. These evidences of an outer world were not too numerous; for, living in a flat, they had not the worry of rates, with their perpetual reminder of social duties, even to the education of other people’s children; the hall porter, too, would not let beggars use the lift; and they had set their faces against belonging to societies, of which they felt that there were far too many. They would pass on from letters such as these to read how their boy at school was “well and happy”; how Lady Bugloss would be so glad if they would dine on such a day; and of the truly awful weather Netta had experienced in the south of France.
Having dispersed, he to the bathroom, she to see if the children had slept well, they would meet again at breakfast, and divide the newspaper. They took a journal which, having studied the art of making people comfortable, when compelled to notice things that had been happening in a cosmic, not a classic sortof way, did so in a manner to inspire a certain confidence, as who should say: “We, as an organ of free thought and speech, invite you, gentle reader, to observe these little matters with your usual classic eye. That they are always there, we know; but as with meat, the well-done is well-done, and the under-done is under-done—for one to lie too closely by the other would be subversive of the natural order of the joint. This is why, although we print this matter, we print it in a way that will enable you to read it in a classic, not a cosmic, spirit.”
Having run their eyes over such pieces of intelligence, they turned to things of more immediate interest, the speeches of an Opposition statesman, which showed the man was probably a knave, and certainly a fool; the advertisements of motorcars, for they were seriously thinking of buying one; and a column on that international subject, the cricket match between Australia and the Mother Country. The reviews of books and plays they alsoread, noting carefully such as promised well, and those that were likely to make them feel uncomfortable. “I think we might go to that, dear; it seems nice,” she would say; and he would answer: “Yes! And look here, don’t put this novel on the list, I’m not going to read that.” Then they would sit silent once again, holding the journal’s pages up before their breasts, as though sheltering their hearts. If, by any chance the journal recommended books which, when read, gave them pain—causing them to see that the world held people who were short of comfort—they were more grieved than angry, for some little time not speaking much, then suddenly asseverating that they did not see the use of making yourself miserable over dismal matters; it was sad, but everybody had their troubles, and if one looked into things, one almost always found that the sufferings of others were really their own fault. But their journal seldom failed them, and they seldom failed their journal; and whether they had made it what it was, or it had made themwhat they were, was one of those things no man knows.
They sat at right angles at the breakfast table, and when they glanced up at each other’s cheeks their looks were kindly and affectionate. “You are a comfort to me, my dear, and I am a comfort to you,” those glances said.
Her cheek, in fact, was firm, and round, and fresh, and its strong cheekbone mounted almost to the little dark niche of her grey eye. Her hair, which had a sheen as though the sun were always falling on it, seemed to caress the top curve of her clean pink ear. There was just the suspicion of a chin beneath her rounded jaw. His cheek was not so strong and moulded; it was flat, and coloured reddish brown, with a small patch of special shaving just below the side growth of his hair, clipped close in to the top lobe of the ear. The bristly wing of his moustache showed sandy-brown above the corner of his lips, whose fullness was compressed. About that sideview of his face there was the faintsuggestion that his appetites might some day get the better of his comfort.
Having finished breakfast they would separate; he to his vocation, she to her shopping and her calls. Their pursuit of these was marked by a direct and grave simplicity, a sort of genius for deciding what they should avoid, a real knowledge of what they wanted, and a certain power of getting it. They met again at dinner, and would recount all they had done throughout that busy day: What risks he had taken at Lloyd’s, where he was an underwriter; how she had ordered a skirt, been to a picture-gallery, and seen a royal personage; how he had looked in at Tattersall’s about the boy’s pony for the holidays; how she had interviewed three cooks without result. It was a pleasant thing to hear that talk, with its comfortable, home-like flavour, and its reliance on a real sympathy and understanding of each other.
Every now and then they would come home indignant or distressed, having seen a lost dog, or a horse dead from heator overwork. They were peculiarly affected by the sufferings of animals; and covering her pink ears, she would cry: “Oh, Dick! how horrible!” or he would say: “Damn! don’t rub it in, old girl!” If they had seen any human being in distress, they rarely mentioned, or indeed remembered it, partly because it was such a common sight, partly because their instincts reasoned thus: “If I once begin to see what is happening before my eyes all day and every day, I shall either feel uncomfortable and be compelled to give time and sympathy and money, and do harm into the bargain, destroying people’s independence; or I shall become cynical, which is repulsive. But, if I stay in my own garden—as it were—and never look outside, I shall not see what is happening, and if I do not see, it will be as if there were nothing there to see!” Deeper than this, no doubt, they had an instinctive knowledge that they were the fittest persons in the State. They did not follow out this feeling in terms of reasoning, but they dimly understood that it was because their fathers, themselves, and children, had all lived in comfort, and that if they once began diminishing that comfort they would become nervous, and deteriorate. This deep instinct, for which Nature was responsible, made them feel that it was no real use to concern themselves with anything that did not help to preserve their comfort, and the comfort of all such as they were likely to be breeding from, to a degree that would ensure their nerves and their perceptions being coated, so that they literallycouldnot see. It made them feel—with a splendid subtlety which kept them quite unconscious—that this was their duty to Nature, to themselves, and to the State.
Seated at dinner, they were more than ever like two pigeons, when those comfortable home-like birds are seen close together on a lawn, looking at each other between the movements of their necks towards the food before them. And suddenly, pausing with sweetbread on his fork, he would fix his round light eyes onthe bowl of flowers in front of him, and say: “I saw Helen to-day, looking as thin as a lath; she simply works herself to death down there!”
When they had finished eating they would go down-stairs, and, summoning a cab, be driven to the play. On the way, they looked straight before them, digesting their food. In the streets the lamplight whitened the wet pavements, and the wind blew impartially on starved faces, and faces like their own. Without turning to him, she would murmur: “I can’t make up my mind, dear, whether to get the children’s summer suits at once, or wait till after Easter.” When he had answered, there would again be silence. And as the cab turned into a by-street, some woman, with a shawl over her head and a baby in her arms, would pass before the horse’s nose, and, turning her deathly face, mutter an imprecation. Throwing out the end of his cigar, he would say quietly: “Look here, if we’re not going abroad this year, it’s time I looked out for a fishing up in Skye.” Then, recoveringthe main thoroughfare, they would reach their destination.
The theatre had for them a strange attraction. They experienced beneath its roof a peculiar sense of rest, like some man-at-arms would feel in the old days when, putting off his armour, he stretched his feet out in the evening to the fire. It was a double process that produced in them this feeling of repose. They must have had a dim suspicion that they had been going about all day in armour; here, and here alone, they would be safe against gaunt realities, and naked truths; nothing here could assail their comfort, since the commercial value of the piece depended on its pleasing them. Everything would therefore be presented in a classic—not a cosmic—spirit, suitable to people of their status. But this was only half the process which wrought in them the sense of ease. For, seated side by side, their attentive eyes fixed on the stage, the thrill of “seeing life” would come; and this “life”—that was so far removed from life—seemed to bring to them a blessedabsolution from all need to look on it in other forms.
They would come out, subtly inspired, secretly strengthened. And whether the play had made them what they were, or they had made the play, was another of those things that no man knows. Their spiritual exaltation would take them to their mansions, and elevate them till they reached their floor.
But when—seldom, luckily—their journal was at fault, and they found themselves confronted with a play subversive of their comfort, their faces, at first attentive, would grow a little puzzled, then hurt, and lastly angry; and they would turn to each other, as though by exchanging anger they could minimize the harm that they were suffering. She would say in a loud whisper: “I think it’s a perfectly disgusting play!” and he would answer: “So dull—that’s what I complain of!”
After a play like this they talked a good deal in the cab on the way home, of anything except the play, as though sending it to Coventry; but every now and then a queer silence would fall between them. He would break it by clucking his tongue against his palate, remarking: “Confound that beastly play!” And she, with her arms folded on her breast, would give herself a little hug of comfort. They felt how unfairly this play had taken them to see it.
On evenings such as this, before going to their room, they would steal into the nursery—she in advance, he following, as if it were queer of him—and, standing side by side, watch their little daughters sleeping. The pallid radiance of the nightlight fell on the little beds, and on those small forms so confidently quiet; it fell too, on their own watching faces, and showed the faintly smiling look about her lips, over the feathered collar of her cloak; showed his face, above the whiteness of his shirt-front, ruddy, almost shining, craning forward with a little puzzled grin, which seemed to say: “They’re rather sweet; how the devil did I come to have them?”
So, often, must two pigeons have stood, looking at their round, soft, grey-white young! They would touch each other’s arms, and point out a tiny hand crumpled together on the pillow, or a little mouth pouting at sleep, and steal away on tiptoe.
In their own room, standing a minute at the window, they inhaled the fresh night air, with a reviving sense of comfort. Out there, the moonlight silvered the ragged branches of the elm tree, the dark block of mansions opposite—what else it silvered in the town, they fortunately could not see!
InKensington Gardens, that February day, it was very still. Trees, stripped of every leaf, raised their bare clean twigs towards a sky so grey and so unstirring that there might never have been wind or sun. And on those branches pigeons sat, silent, as though they understood that there was no new life as yet; they seemed waiting, loth to spread their wings lest they should miss the coming of the Spring.
Down in the grass the tiniest green flames were burning, a sign of the fire of flowers that would leap up if the sun would feed them.
And on a seat there sat a child.
He sat between his father and his mother, looking straight before him. It was plain that the reason why he lookedso straight before him was that he really had not strength to care to look to right or left—so white his face was, so puny were his limbs. His clothes had evidently been designed for others, and this was fortunate, for they prevented the actual size of him from being seen. He was not, however, what is called neglected; his face was clean, and the utmost of protection that Fate and the condition of his parents had vouchsafed was evidently lavished on him, for round his neck there was a little bit of draggled fur which should have been round the neck of her against whose thin and shabby side he leaned. This mother of his was looking at the ground; and from the expression of her face she seemed to think that looking at the ground was all life had to offer.
The father sat with his eyes shut. He had shabby clothes, a grey face, and a grey collar that had once been white. Above the collar his thin cheeks had evidently just been shaved—for it was Saturday, and by the colour of thosecheeks, and by his boots, whose soles, hardly thicker than a paper sheet, still intervened between him and the ground, he was seen not to be a tramp or outdoor person, but an indoor worker of some sort, and very likely out of work, who had come out to rest in the company of his wife and family. His eyes being shut, he sat without the pain of looking at a single thing, moving his jaw at intervals from side to side, as though he had a toothache.
And between this man who had begotten, and this woman who had borne him, the child sat, very still, evidently on good terms with them, not realising that they had brought him out of a warm darkness where he had been happy, out of a sweet nothingness, into which, and soon perhaps, he would pass again—not realising that they had so neglected to keep pace with things, or that things had so omitted to keep pace with them, that he himself had eaten in his time about one half the food he should have eaten, and that of the wrong sort. By the expression of his face, that pale small ghost had evidently grasped the truth that things were as they had to be. He seemed to sit there reviewing his own life, and taking for granted that it must be what it was, from hour to hour, and day to day, and year to year.
And before me, too, the incidents of his small journey passed; I saw him, in the morning, getting off the family bed, where it was sometimes warm, and chewing at a crust of bread before he set off to school in company with other children, some of whom were stouter than himself; saw him carrying in his small fist the remnants of his feast, and dropping it, or swopping it away for peppermints, because it tired him to consume it, having no juices to speak of in his little stomach. I seemed to understand that, accustomed as he was to eating little, he almost always wanted to eat less, not because he had any wish to die—nothing so extravagant—but simply that he nearly always felt a little sick; I felt that his pale, despondent mother was alwaysurging him to eat, when there were things to eat, and that this bored him, since they did not strike him as worth all that trouble with his jaws. She must have found it difficult indeed to persuade him that there was any point at all in eating; for, from his looks, he could manifestly not now enjoy anything but peppermints and kippered herrings. I seemed to see him in his school, not learning, not wanting to learn, anything, nor knowing why this should be so, ignorant of the dispensations of a Providence who—after hesitating long to educate him lest this should make his parents paupers—now compelled his education, having first destroyed his stomach that he might be incapable of taking in what he was taught. That small white creature could not as yet have grasped the notion that the welfare of the future lay, not with the future, but with the past. He only knew that every day he went to school with little in his stomach, and every day came back from school with less.
All this he seemed to be reviewing as he sat there, but not in thought; his knowledge was too deep for words; he was simply feeling, as a child that looked as he looked would naturally be feeling, on that bench between his parents. He opened his little mouth at times, as a small bird will open its small beak, without apparent purpose; and his lips seemed murmuring:
“My stomach feels as if there were a mouse inside it; my legs are aching; it’s all quite natural, no doubt!”
To reconcile this apathy of his with recollections of his unresting, mirthless energy down alleys and on doorsteps, it was needful to remember Human Nature, and its exhaustless cruse of courage. For, though he might not care to live, yet, while he was alive he would keep his end up, because he must—there was no other way. And why exhaust himself in vain regrets and dreams of things he could not see, and hopes of being what he could not be! That he had no resentment against anything was certain from hispatient eyes—not even against those two who sat, one on either side of him—unaware that he was what he was, in order that they who against his will had brought him into being, might be forced by law to keep a self-respect they had already lost, and have the unsought pride of giving him an insufficiency of things he could not eat. For he had as yet no knowledge of political economy. He evidently did not view his case in any petty, or in any party, spirit; he did not seem to look on himself as just a half-starved child that should have cried its eyes out till it was fed at least as well as the dogs that passed him; he seemed to look on himself as that impersonal, imperial thing—the Future of the Race.
So profound his apathy!
And, as I looked, the “Future of the Race” turned to his father:
“’Ark at that b——y bird!” he said.
It was a pigeon, who high upon a tree, had suddenly begun to croon. One could see his head outlined against the grey, unstirring sky, first bending back, thendown into his breast, then back again; and that soft song of his filled all the air, like an invocation of fertility.
“The Future of the Race” watched him for a minute without moving, and suddenly he laughed. That laugh was a little hard noise like the clapping of two boards—there was not a single drop of blood in it, nor the faintest sound of music; so might a marionette have laughed—a figure made of wood and wire!
And in that laugh I seemed to hear innumerable laughter, the laughter in a million homes of the myriad unfed.
So laughed the Future of the richest and the freest and the proudest race that had ever lived on earth, that February afternoon, with the little green flames lighted in the grass, under a sky that knew not wind or sun—so he laughed at the pigeon that was calling for the Spring.
Thinkingof him as he had looked, sitting there in his worn clothes, a cloth cap crumpled in his hand, leaning a little forward, and staring at the wall with those eyes of his that looked like fire behind steel bars; remembering his words: “She’s dead to me—I’ll never think of her again where I’m going!” I wrote this letter:
“Dear ——,
“From something you said yesterday, I feel that I ought to tell you that when you get to Canada you will not be free to marry again.
“I was present, as you know, when you told your story in the Police Court—a story very often told there. I know that you were not to blame, and that all you said was true. Owing to no fault ofyours, your wife has left you for a life of vice. Through this misfortune you have lost your home, your children, and your work; and you are going to Canada as a last resource. You and she will pass the rest of your lives in different hemispheres. You are still a young man, strong, accustomed to married life; you are going where married men are wanted, to a country of great spaces and great loneliness, where your homestead may be miles from any other.
“This is all true enough; nevertheless you are as closely bound to this wife who has left you for a life of public shame as if she were the truest wife and mother in this city.
“If, where you are going, you meet some girl that you would like to marry, you must not, or you will be a bigamist—a criminal. If this girl come to you unmarried, she will, of course, lose her good name. Your children, if you have any, will be born in what is called a state of shame; that they have had no voice in the matter of their birth won’t help them,as you will find. If she refuses to come to you unmarried—and you can hardly blame her—you will probably be driven, like most men in your position, to get what comfort you can from women who are like your wife. Society, of course, condemns these women, men of heart regard them with compassion, men of science with dismay. They breed canker in the nation; but as you cannot marry again, you will, I fear, be driven to their company.
“There is nothing special in your case—thousands in this country are in a similar position; you are all governed by an impartial Law.
“That Law is this: A woman can divorce a man who is faithless and treats her with cruelty or deserts her. A man can divorce a woman who is faithless. You could have divorced your wife! Why didn’t you? Let us see!
“You were first a soldier, and then a working man. They paid you as a soldier, I believe, one shilling and twopence a day; suppose you saved the pence,allowing for your wife not being on your hands, and your children living on air? Fourteenpence a week—three pounds and eightpence a year, if you were lucky. As a workman your wages were thirty shillings a week? With four children you could save perhaps your subscription to theHearts of Oak, and, say, twopence a day besides? Three pounds and eightpence every year. A divorce in the High Court of Justice, for to that you were undoubtedly entitled by the Law, would have cost you from sixty to a hundred pounds. So, if you could have arranged to keep your witnesses alive, you might, with strict economy, have been granted your decree, if not yourself already dead, in, say, twenty years.
“In this delay there is nothing peculiar or unjust. The Law, for rich or poor, artisan or peer, is, as you know, identical. The Courts make no distinction in favour of the wealthy over a man earning his seventy-odd pounds a year, with five pounds in the Savings Bank—a decree for millionaire, or clerk, orworking man, costs just about the same.
“To this rule, however, there is one exception; it is of course in favour of the poor. One who can prove that he is not worth the sum of five-and-twenty pounds is entitled to the name of pauper, and can sue for divorcein formâ pauperis. This does not indeed apply to working men or clerks in work; but you, who, knocked out of time by the conduct of your wife, had lost your work, and were sleeping in the parks at night or in a common lodging house, not knowing where to turn, could not have proved your worth at five-and-twenty pence. You could have suedin formâ pauperis. This was a great privilege! You should have found a lawyer who would undertake your case on no security, obtained your evidence without the payment of a penny, got your witnesses to come to the Court and give their time for nothing (when every idle hour meant bread out of their mouths); you should have achieved these triumphs over Nature, and you might have been divorced for anything from seven to fifteen pounds. True, you had not seven to fifteen pence, but—you had the privilege!
“It is admitted that you were a good husband to your wife, as good a husband as a man could be; it is admitted that the fault was hers entirely. It is admitted that you were entitled to relief. By the Law, which is the same for all, however, this was not enough.
“For this is what I want you to fully understand:A man of meansmay drive his wife to loathe him, provided he stop short of certain definite things—for the Law does not allow him to be ‘cruel’ to her; he may entertain himself with other women provided that she does not know, for the Law does not allow him to be ‘faithless’; he may be, in fact, at heart a ruffian or a rascal, but—having means—if she leave him for another, he can, unless he has bad luck, be sure of his decree. Thus, it did not really matter whether you were false to her, so long as she did not know; it was almost superfluous to be so kind; what really matteredwas that, either, as a working man with thirty shillings a week, you had sixty to a hundred pounds—or, as a penniless pauper, you had seven to fifteen.
“The Law of Divorce, like all our laws, is made without fear or favour, for the protection and safety of us all; it is founded in justice and equity, that grievances may be redressed, and all who are wrong may have their remedy. It does not concern itself whether a man is rich or poor, but administers its simple principles, requiring those who are not destitute to pay for their decrees at a price that is the same for all, whatever their means may be; requiring those who are destitute to pay for their decrees at a price beyond their means.
“I seem to hear you asking: ‘Could I not have been granted a remedy at a price proportioned to my means? Must I, and every working man whose wife leaves him as mine did, to drink in public houses, and walk the streets at night, be condemned for ever after to live alone, or to live in immorality?’
“The answer is a simple one: ‘If all the clerks and working men, and all those wives of clerks and working men—to whom, like you, divorce was due by almost general consent, and was indeed by almost general consent deemed of a desperate importance—were enabled to obtain it at a price within their means, several thousand more divorces would each year be granted in this country. This would have a disastrous effect upon the statistics of the marriage tie. Public Opinion, formed, you must remember, exclusively amongst your betters (for on such subjects working men are, and always have been, dumb), formed exclusively by such as can afford to pay for their decrees—this great Public Opinion would feel that a backward step was being taken on the path of moral rectitude. It would feel that, in granting what you, the People, in your dumbness and short sight might be tempted to think was common justice, it would be sacrificing the substance of morals to the shadow. The immorality to which you and your likeunder the present law are, and ever will be, forced, need never lie open to the light of day, never become a matter of statistics, and offend the Public Eye. What is not a matter of statistics can do no damage to the country’s morals or the country’s name. Public Opinion is itself secure in the enjoyment of the rights and privileges granted by the law, and it has decided by a simple sacrifice to conserve the moral fame of all. There must—it reasons—be a sacrifice; then let us sacrifice those without the means to pay! It is an accident that they, in their thousands, are not included in ourselves; some must suffer that we may all be moral!’
“This is the answer. It is too much, perhaps, to ask you, from the marsh of suffering, with your low personal point of view, to appreciate the heights of impersonality reached in this vicarious sacrifice. But you may possibly respect its depths of common sense. Can you blame the practical wisdom of this Public Opinion, in which you have no part? Ifyou had a part in it, would you not yourself endorse it? Ifyouwere a man of means, that is of means sufficient to enjoy the privileges of the Law, would you seriously offer to exert yourself to upset your conception of your country’s moral worth, and lose secretly a little of your self-esteem, that you might extend those privileges to such of your fellow-citizens as could not pay for them? Would you not rather feel: My own position is secure; this idea is only sentiment, mereabstractjustice! If they want it they must pay for it!
“By no means think that this great principle of payment is confined merely to divorce; it underlies all justice in a greater or a less degree. It is ‘money makes the mare to go!’ It is money that dictates the measure of justice and its methods. But this is so mingled with the essence of our lives that we do not even notice it. Why, you could hardly find a man who, if you went to him in private and put your case, would not say at once that you were hardly used! Tothe Law you cannot go privately; and the Law is the guardian of all justice.
“I have told you the requirements of the Law. You have not fulfilled them. And, having made this error, you must, evidently, now go forth, either to enjoy your own society for the remainder of your days, or, as Nature drives you, to consort with those who at each touch will remind you of what your wife has now become; and in this journey of enjoyment, whichever of the two journeys it may be, you will be sustained, no doubt, by the consciousness that you are serving the morality of your country, and strengthening the esteem in which the marriage tie is held. You will be inspired by the knowledge that you are sharing this voyage of pleasure and of privilege with thousands of other men and women, as decent and as kind as you. And you will feel, year by year, prouder and prouder of your country that has reached these heights of justice....”
Wetor fine, hot or cold, nothing was more certain than that the lame man would pass, leaning on his twisted oaken stick, his wicker basket slung on his shoulder. In that basket, covered by a bit of sacking, was groundsel, and rarely, in the season, a few mushrooms kept carefully apart in a piece of newspaper.
His blunt, wholesome, weather-beaten face with its full brown beard, now going grey, was lined and sad because his leg continually gave him pain. That leg had shrivelled through an accident, and being now two inches shorter than it should have been, did little save remind him of mortality. He had a respectable, though not an affluent, appearance, for his old blue overcoat, his trousers, waistcoat, hat, were ragged from long use and stained byweather. He had been a deep-sea fisherman before his accident, but now he made his living by standing on the pavement at a certain spot, in Bayswater, from ten o’clock to seven in the evening. And any one who wished to give her bird a luxury would stop before his basket, and buy a pennyworth of groundsel.
Often—as he said—he had “a job to get it,” rising at five o’clock, and going out of London by an early tram to the happy hunting grounds of those who live on the appetites of caged canaries. Here, dragging his injured limb with difficulty through ground that the heavens seldom troubled to keep dry for him, he would stoop and toilfully amass the small green plant with its close yellow-centred heads, though often—as he mentioned—“there don’t seem no life like in the stuff, the frosts ha’ spiled it!” Having collected all that Fate permitted him, he would take the tram back home, and start out for his day’s adventure.
Now and again, when things had not gone well, his figure would be seen stumping home through darkness as late as nine or ten o’clock at night. On such occasions his grey-blue eyes, which had never quite lost their look of gazing through sea-mists, would reflect the bottom of his soul, where the very bird of weariness lay with its clipped wings, for ever trying to regain the air.
In fact—as he had no need to tell you—he was a “trier” from year’s end to year’s end, but he had no illusions concerning his profession—there was “nothing in it”; though it was better on the whole than flowers, where there was less than nothing. And, after all, having got accustomed to the struggles of that bird of weariness within his soul, he would even perhaps have missed it, had it at last succeeded in rising from the ground and taking flight.
“An ’ard life!” he had been heard to say when groundsel was scarce, customers scarcer, and the damp had struck up into his shrivelled leg. This, stated as a matter of fact, was the extent of his general complaint, though he would notunwillingly descant on the failings of his groundsel, his customers, and leg, to the few who could appreciate such things. But, as a rule, he stood or sat, silent, watching the world go by, as in old days he had watched the waves drift against his anchored fishing-smack; and the look of those blurred-blue, far-gazing eyes of his, in their extraordinary patience, was like a constant declaration of the simple and unconscious creed of man: “I hold on till I drop.”
What he thought about while he stood there it was difficult to say—possibly of old days round the Goodwins, of the yellow buttons of his groundsel that refused to open properly, of his leg, and dogs that would come sniffing at his basket and showing their contempt, of his wife’s gouty rheumatism, and herrings for his tea, of his arrears of rent, of how few people seemed to want his groundsel, and once more of his leg.
Practically no one stopped to look at him, unless she wanted a pennyworth of groundsel for her pale bird. And whenthey did look at him they saw—nothing symbolic—simply a brown-bearded man, with deep furrows in his face, and a lame leg, whose groundsel was often of a quality that they did not dare to offer their canaries. They would tell him so, adding that the weather was cold; to which, knowing a little more about it than themselves, he would reply: “Yes, m’m—you wouldn’t believe how I feel it in my leg.” In this remark he was extremely accurate, but they would look away, and pass on rather hastily, doubting whether a man should mention a lame leg—it looked too much as if he wanted to make something out of it. In truth he had the delicacy of a deep-sea fisherman, but he had owned his leg so long that it had got on his nerves; it was too intimate a part of all his life, and speak of it he must. And sometimes, but generally on warm and genial days, when his groundsel was properly in bloom and he had less need of adventitious help, his customers would let their feelings get the better of them and give him pennies, when ha’pennieswould have been enough. This, unconsciously, had served to strengthen his habit of alluding to his leg.
He had, of course, no holidays, but occasionally he was absent from his stand. This was when his leg, feeling that he was taking it too much as a matter of course, became what he would call “a mass o’ pain.” Such occasions threw him behindhand with his rent; but, as he said: “If you can’t get out, you can’t—can you?” After these vacations he would make special efforts, going far afield for groundsel, and remaining on his stand until he felt that if he did not get off it then, he never would.
Christmas was his festival, for at Christmas people were more indulgent to their birds, and his regular customers gave him sixpence. This was just as well, for, whether owing to high living, or merely to the cold, he was nearly always laid up about that time. After this annual bout of “brownchitis,” as he called it, his weather-beaten face looked strangely pale, his blue eyes seemed tohave in them the mist of many watches—so might the drowned ghost of a deep-sea fisherman have looked; and his pale roughened hand would tremble, hovering over the groundsel that had so little bloom, trying to find something that a bird need not despise.
“You wouldn’t believe the job I had to find even this little lot,” he would say. “Sometimes I thought I’d leave me leg be’ind, I was that weak I couldn’ seem to drag it through the mud at all. An’ my wife, she’s got the gouty rheumatiz. You’ll think that I’m all trouble!” And, summoning God-knows-what spirit of hilarity, he smiled. Then, looking at the leg he had nearly left behind, he added somewhat boastfully: “You see, it’s got no strength in it at all—there’s not a bit o’ muscle left.... Very few people,” his eyes and voice seemed proudly saying, “have got a leg like this!”
To the dispassionate observer of his existence it was a little difficult to understand what attraction life could have forhim; a little difficult to penetrate down through the blackness of his continual toil and pains, to the still living eyes of that bird of weariness, lying within his soul, moving always, if but slightly, its wounded stumps of wings. It seemed, on the whole, unreasonable of this man to cling to life, since he was without prospect of anything but what was worse in this life; and, in the matter of a life to come, would dubiously remark: “My wife’s always a-tellin’ me we can’t be no worse off where we’re a-goin’. An’ she’s right, no doubt, if so be as we’re goin’ anywhere!”
And yet, so far as could be seen, the thought: “Why do I continue living?” never came to him. It almost seemed as if it must be giving him a secret joy to measure himself against his troubles. And this was fortunate, for in a day’s march one could not come across a better omen for the future of mankind.
In the crowded highway, beside his basket, he stood, leaning on his twisted stick, with his tired, steadfast face—aragged statue to the great, unconscious human virtue, the most hopeful and inspiring of all things on earth: Courage without Hope!
End.