Hecame on one side of farmer stock who had married farmer stock since the invasion of the Saxons, and on the other side of county families who had married county families since the Norman conquest. He was born where the town ended and country life began, educated at a public school, and his father was a judge.
Being designed for a profession he had adopted it, keeping himself in hand, so as not to be unpleasantly professional. For since the time when he was wheeled in perambulators he had never wanted to do anything too much. He had so completely seen the other side of being wheeled in perambulators that he had ever afterwards been loth to put himself in a position which made it needful forhim to act with all his heart. His organs were in fact remarkably adjusted. He had not too much head nor too much heart. He had not too much appetite, but he had appetite enough. When asked at lunch of which sweet he would partake, he would answer: “A little of both, thanks”; for nothing seemed to him in life so great a pity as to take one thing to the exclusion of another. The instinct was so founded in the very roots of him that he knew nothing of it; and it was this unconsciousness which lent a simple strength to what might otherwise have seemed an undecided character.
His attitude to women was a guarded one. It was repugnant to him to have too much wife, and yet, not wife enough was also very painful; and so he had devised a way out of his embarrassment by saying to himself: “We two are only married to the extent that we desire to be; we will do exactly as we like.” And he found that by thinking this, and getting his wife, who was a clever woman, to say she thought it too, he remained extremelyfaithful. With regard to children, it had no doubt been difficult, for—after a year or two—to have children and not to have them had been found impossible. In this dilemma he had considered very seriously what course he should adopt, and having carefully weighed the pro’s and con’s had discovered them to be so very equal that he could come to no conclusion. In consequence of this he had two children; after which he found no difficulty in not wanting to have more.
The question of his residence had occasioned him some pain; for, supposing that he lived in town he missed the country, and supposing that he resided in the country he missed the town. He therefore lived a little in both town and country; so regulating things that when in London he wanted to be out, and when out of London he wanted to be in, which kept him healthy.
A moderate meat diet gave him a hankering after other diets, making him a vegetarian in theory, so that he was in accord with either school. He drankwine at times; at times he drank no wine; he smoked one cigar after every meal—no more, because more made him sick.
His feeling about money was that he ought to have enough, in order to have no feeling about money; and, to attain this vacuum, he mechanically restrained his wants, still more his wife’s—for, not being so beautifully adjusted as himself, when she wanted things, shewantedthem.
In matters of religion he would not commit himself to any definite opinions. If asked whether he thought there were a future life, he would say: “I see no reason to believe there is; on the other hand, I see no object in believing that there isn’t; there may be, or there may not be; or, again, there may be a future life for some, no future life for others—a little of both, perhaps.”
Dogma of any sort, of course, he found offensive—you were committed by it, and to be committed was both repulsive and absurd.
Once or twice only in his life had heseriously felt careless, and these were on occasions when he found his carelessness was threatened by some person or event that tried to tie him down.
There was in him a sort of terror of being bound to anything; and when he was returned to Parliament, which happened after he was forty, he felt a natural uneasiness. Was he committed; if so, what was he committed to? Could he still get down on either side; and suppose he did get down, could he at once get up again? And he was happy when he found he could.
It was remarkable how national he was.
Yet he was not entirely conscious of his importance to the State, not recognising perhaps sufficiently how many other men were like him in every walk of life—not recognising that he was, in truth, the solid centre of the nation’s pudding.
There was a word that he had early learnt to spell; it started with a C, the second letter was an O, the third an M, the fourth a P, the fifth an R, the sixthan O, the seventh M, the eighth an I, the ninth an S, the last an E. Once learnt, soon after he escaped from perambulators, that word was never more forgot. He took it to his office, he took it to his church, he took it into bed with him at nights. And now that he had become a public man he took it to the House. But, having a regard, a veneration, for the figure of John Bull—that myth who never modified his views, but held on fast to his ideals in spite of all the dogs of war—he preferred, whenever he was forced to act, tosaythat he had acted on his principles—and so, in truth, he had, for the deepest of his principles was the intimate belief that there was no such thing as principle.
This it was that gave him his pre-eminence in politics, for, seated in the very centre of the seesaw, being the first to feel and answer to, he was the least affected by, its motion. By shifting just a little, and instinctively, he kept the whole machine together, having all the time a quiet contempt for the two ends that would keep swinging to the skies or bumpingon the ground. Nothing could be done without him in that House, because he was so plentiful; and very little with him.
He had a sense of humour, and devoted it to seeing all the fun there was in “cranks,” and in extravagance of every kind. Never was he more amused than when he saw a person really give himself to anything; he would sit, sometimes with his hat on and sometimes with it off, watching with a quiet smile to see the fellow bump; and the bigger the bump was, the funnier he found it! But for such as smiled at careful men he had a feeling that you could not take them seriously; it was their little joke, and not a very good one; and especially he wondered how people could be found foolish enough to place these persons in an Institution where care was of the essence of the atmosphere. Confident, however, that their want of care would soon undo them, he did not trouble much.
Phrases such as “There is no middle policy” sometimes carried him away for quite five minutes; but he invariablycame back in time to find there was. It had, in fact, long been a fixed and firm belief with him that he could make omelettes without breaking eggs, and though he clearly made no omelettes, on the other hand he broke no eggs. Nor did he ever fracture his belief that he was just about to make an omelette. And after all, an omelette, even if you made it, what did it amount to? There it was! You ate it, and had to make another! Better far to fix an omelette in your mind, and keep it there unmade. But discussion on the omelette’s composition he was always ready to encourage; and, sitting with his eye cocked at the ingredients, he would talk them over very carefully, and now and then break off a sprig of parsley, so that the omelette really did advance—but not too fast. Sometimes he was even known to contemplate the omelette all the night, but this he only did because he was so very much afraid that if he left it somebody would cook the thing; and he would go home in the early morning to his wife, complainingrather bitterly that with a little care all this excessive cooking in the House might be avoided.
Take him for all in all, he was not original in mind, and yet he was no flunkey, serving mortal masters; he served a nobler one than they—the great god Opportunity. But it was not safe to tell him this, for though there was no reason in the world why he should dislike its being known that he acted in accordance with his nature, somehow he did not like it. This was, no doubt, an instance of his care.
Hardly any social measure could be brought to his attention with which he did not feel a certain meed of sympathy. If, for instance, somebody proposed a scheme of Old-Age Pensions, he would give a careful nod, and wait, because he knew that when somebody got up and said that this was dangerous, he should agree with him; or, again, if it were suggested that children should be made less hungry out of the public rates, he approved, but not too much, because hefelt that to approve too much would interfere with his approval of the plan that they should not be fed out of the public rates. “A little bit of both,” would be his thought, and by this masterly decision, which was often called his commonsense, he infallibly secured possession to the children of a little bit of neither; but, as he very justly said, to grant the first was too progressive; to grant the second, retrograde. And so with every other measure.
His leaders on both sides had learned from long experience the daintiness of his digestion; how very sensitive it was to motion; how, if jolted, it revolted; and so they did not try too hard to jolt it now, for they naturally hated to be cast into the air. They appreciated, too, his sterling worth—without him they felt the country would improve too fast.
And those leaders of his would look at him. With his eyelids lowered, but his eyes a little anxious, with his lips pinched in, and yet half-smiling, in anovercoat of medium weight, put on or taken off according to the weather, he sat, not very often opening his mouth. Behind his grey and unobtrusive figure they saw the masses of grey, unobtrusive, careful men, and a little shiver would run down their spines.
Too often had they awakened from their dreams and seen him sitting there, under a tall grey tower with a clock that faced all ways, bench upon bench, row after row, by day, by night, one eye of him on one side, and one eye on the other, and his nose between them in the middle.
I sawhim first on a spring day—one of those days when the limbs are lazy with delicious tiredness, the air soft and warm against the face, the heart full of a queer longing to know the hearts of other men.
He was quite a little man, with broad, high shoulders, and hardly any neck; and what was noticeable in his square, wooden-looking figure, dressed in light, shabby tweed, and patched, yellow boots, was that he seemed to have no chest. He was flat—from his white face, with its sandy hair, moustache, and eyebrows, under an old, narrow-brimmed straw hat, right down to his feet. It was as though life had planed him. His face, too, seemed to have lost all but its bones and skin of yellow-white; there were no eyelashes to his reddish-brown round eyes;there was no colour in his thin lips, compressed as though to keep the secret of a mortal fear. Save for the wheeze and rustle of his breathing, he stood very still, nervously rubbing his claw-like hands up and down his trouser-legs. His voice was hoarse and faint.
“Yes, I was a baker,” he said. “They tell me as how that’s where I’ve done myself the harm. But I never learnt another trade; I was afraid that if I give it up I wouldn’t get no other work. Bakin’s not good for——”
He laid his thin, yellow fingers where there was so little left to lay them on.
“There’s my wife and child,” he went on in his matter-of-fact voice; “I’m fair frightened. If I could give up thinking of what’s coming to them, I believe that I’d feel better. But what am I to do? All my savin’s have gone now; I’m selling off my things, an’ when I’m through with that—there we shall be.”
His unlovely little face, with its hard-bitten lips and lashless eyes, quivered all over suddenly, as though within him allhis fear had risen up, seized on his features, and set them to a dance of agony; but they were soon still again. Stillness was the only possible condition for a face covering such thoughts as he had had.
“I don’t sleep for thinkin’ of it—that’s against me!”
Yes—that was against him, considering the condition of his health. Any doctor would have told him to sleep well; that sleep, in fact, was quite essential. And I seemed to see him lying on his back, staring at the darkness, with those lashless, red-rimmed eyes, trying to find in its black depths something that was not there—the wan glow of a livelihood of some kind for his wife and child.
“I gets in such a muck o’ sweat, worrying about what’s going to come to them with me like this; it quite exhausts me, it does really. You wouldn’t believe how weak I was!”
And one could not help reminding him that he ought not to worry—it was very bad for him.
“Yes, I know that; I don’t think I can last long at this rate.”
“If you could give up worrying, you would get well much quicker!”
He answered by a look of such humble and unconscious irony as one may see on the faces of the dead before their last wonder at the end has faded from them.
“They tells me up at the hospital to eat well!”
And, looking at this meagre little man, it seemed that the advice was sound. Good food, and plenty of it!
“I’ve been doing the best I can, of course.” He made this statement without sarcasm, in a voice that seemed to say: “This world I live in is, of course, a funny world; the sort of fun it likes may be first-rate, but if I were once to begin to laugh at it, where could I stop—I ask you—where?”
“Plenty of milk they tell me is the best thing I can take, but the child she’s bound to have as much as we can manage to buy. At her age, you see, she needs it. Of course, if I could get a job!—I’d take anything—I’d drive a baker’s cart!”
He lifted his little pipes of arms, and let them fall again, and God knows what he meant by such a motion, unless it were to show his strength.
“Of course, some days,” he said, “I can hardly get my breath at all, and that’s against me.”
It would be, as he said, against him; and, encouraged by a look, he added:
“I know I kep’ on too long with my profession; but you know what it is—when you’ve been brought up to a job you get to depend on it; to give it up is like chuckin’ of yourself away. And that’s what I’ve found—people don’t want such as I am now.”
And for a full half-minute we stood looking at each other; his bitten, discoloured lips twitched twice, and a faint pink warmed the paper whiteness of his cheeks.
“Up at the hospital they don’t seem to take no interest in my case any more; seems as if they thought it ’opeless.”
Unconscious that he had gone beneaththe depths of human nature, shown up the human passion for definite success, illustrated human worship of the idol strength, and human scorn for what is weak—he said these simple words in an almost injured tone. Recovery might be impossible, people did not want such as he was now; but he was still interested in himself, still loth to find himself a useless bee ejected from the hive. His lashless eyes seemed saying: “I believe I could get well—I do believe I could!”
Yet he was not unreasonable, for he went on:
“When I first went there they took a lot of interest in me—but that’s a year ago. Perhaps I’ve disappointed them!”
Perhaps he had!
“They kept on telling me to take plenty of fresh air. Where I live, of course, there’s not so very much about, but I take all I can. Not bein’ able to get a job, I’ve been sitting in the Park. I take the child—they tell me not to have her too near me in the house.”
And I had a vision of this man of leisure sitting in the Park, rubbing his hand stealthily to keep them dry, and watching with red eyes the other men of leisure; too preoccupied to wonder even why his leisure was not like theirs.
“Days like this,” he said, “it’s warm enough; but I can’t enjoy them for thinking of what’s coming.”
His glance wandered to the pear-trees in the garden—they were all in blossom, and lighted by the sun; he looked down again a little hastily. A blackbird sang beyond the further wall. The little baker passed his tongue over his lips.
“I’m a countryman by birth,” he said: “it’s like the country here. If I could get a job down in the country I should pick up, perhaps. Last time I was in the country I put on ’alf a stone. But who’d take me?”
Again he raised his little pipes of arms; this time it was clearly not to show his strength. No—he seemed to say: “No one would take me! I have found that out—I have found out all there is to know. I am done for!”
“That’s about where it is,” he said; “and I wouldn’t care so much, but for the baby and my wife. I don’t see what I could ha’ done, other than what I have done. God knows I kept on at it till I couldn’t keep on no longer.”
And as though he knew that he was again near that point when a hundred times he had broken into private agony, seen by no creature but himself, he stared hard at me, and his red moustache bristled over his sunken, indrawn lips.
A pigeon flew across; settling on a tree in the next garden it began to call its mate; and suddenly there came into my mind the memory of a thrush that, some months before, had come to the garden bed where we were standing, and all day long would hide and hop there, avoiding other birds, with its feathers all staring and puffed out. I remembered how it would let us take it up, and the film that kept falling on its eyes, and its sick heart beating so faintly beneath our hands; no bird of all the other birds came nearit—knowing that it could no longer peck its living, and was going to die.
One day we could not find it; the next day we found it under a bush, dead.
“I suppose it’s human nature not to take me on, seein’ the state I’m in,” the little baker said. “I don’t want to be a trouble to no one, I’m sure; I’ve always kept myself, ever since I was that high,” he put his hand out level with his waist; “and now I can’t keep myself, let alone the wife and child. It’s the coming to the end of everything—it’s the seeing of it coming. Fear—that’s what it is! But I suppose I’m not the only one.”
And for that moment he seemed comforted by this thought that there were thousands of other working creatures, on whose shoulders sat the grinning cat of mortal illness, all staring with him at utter emptiness—thousands of other working creatures who were dying because fear had made them work too long. His face brightened ever so little, as though the sun had found a way to him. But suddenly that wooden look, the onlysafe and perfect look, came back to his features. One could have sworn that fear had never touched him, so expressionless, so still was he!
I havewatched you this ten minutes, while your carriage has been standing still, and have seen your smiling face change twice, as though you were about to say; “I am not accustomed to be stopped like this”; but what I have chiefly noticed is that you have not looked at anything except the persons sitting opposite and the backs of your flunkeys on the box. Clearly nothing has distracted you from following your thought: “There is pleasure before me, I am told!” Yours is the three-hundredth carriage in this row that blocks the road for half a mile. In the two hundred and ninety-nine that come before it, and the four hundred that come after, you are sitting too—with your face before you, and your unseeing eyes.
Resented while you gathered being; brought into the world with the most distinguished skill; remembered by your mother when the whim came to her; taught to believe that life consists in caring for your clean, well-nourished body, and your manner that nothing usual can disturb; taught to regard Society as the little ring of men and women that you see, and to feel your only business is to know the next thing that you want and get it given you—You have never had a chance!
You take commands from no other creature; your heart gives you your commands, forms your desires, your wishes, your opinions, and passes them between your lips. From your heart well-up the springs that feed the river of your conduct; but your heart is a stagnant pool that has never seen the sun. Each year when April comes, and the earth smells new, you have an odd aching underneath your corsets. What is it for? You have a husband, or a lover, or both, or neither, whichever suits you best; you have children, or could have them if you wished for them; you are fed at stated intervals with food and wine; you have all you want of country life and country sports; you have the theatre and the opera, books, music, and religion! From the top of the plume, torn from a dying bird, or the flowers, made at an insufficient wage, that decorate your head, to the sole of the shoe that cramps your foot, you are decked out with solemn care; a year of labour has been sewn into your garments and forged into your rings—you are a breathing triumph!
You live in the centre of the centre of the world; if you wish you can have access to everything that has been thought since the world of thought began; if you wish you can see everything that has ever been produced, for you can travel where you like; you are within reach of Nature’s grandest forms and the most perfect works of art. You can hear the last word that is said on everything, if you wish. When you do wish, the latest tastes are servants of your palate, thelatest scents attend your nose—You have never had a chance!
For, sitting there in your seven hundred carriages, you are blind—in heart, and soul, and voice, and walk; the blindest creature in the world. Never for one minute of your life have you thought, or done, or spoken for yourself. You have been prevented; and so wonderful is this plot to keep you blind that you have not a notion it exists. To yourself your sight seems good, such is your pleasant thought. Since you cannot even see this hedge around you, how can there be anything the other side? The ache beneath your corsets in the spring is all you are ever to know of what there is beyond. And no one is to blame for this—you least of all.
It was settled, long before the well-fed dullard’s kiss from which you sprang. Forces have worked, in dim, inexorable progress, from the remotest time till they have bred you, little blind creature, to be the masterpiece of their creation. With the wondrous subtlety of Fate’s selection, they have paired and paired all that most narrowly approaches to the mean, all that by nature shirks the risks of living, all that by essence clings to custom, till they have secured a state of things which has assured your coming, in your perfection of nonentity. They have planted you apart in your expensive mould, and still they are at work—these gardeners never idle—pruning and tying night and day to prevent your running wild. The Forces are proud of you—their waxen, scentless flower!
The sun beats down, and still your carriage does not move; and this delay is getting on your nerves. You cannot imagine what is blocking-up your way! Do you ever imagine anything? If all those goodly coverings that contain you could be taken off, what should we find within the last and inmost shell—a little soul that has lost its power of speculation. A soul that was born in you a bird and has become a creeping thing; wings gone, eyes gone, groping, and clawing with its tentacles what is given it.
You stand up, speaking to your coachman! And you are charming, standing there, to us who, like your footman, cannot see the label “Blind.” The cut of your gown is perfect, the dressing of your hair the latest, the trimming of your hat is later still; your trick of speech the very thing; you droop your eyelids to the life; you have not too much powder; it is a lesson in grace to see you hold your parasol. The doll of Nature! So, since you were born; so, until you die! And, with his turned, clean-shaven face, your footman seems to say: “Madam, how you have come to be it is not my province to inquire. You are! I am myself dependent on you!” You are the heroine of the farce, but no one smiles at you, for you are tragic, the most tragic figure in the world. No fault of yours that ears and eyes and heart and voice are atrophied so that you have no longer spirit of your own!
Fashion brought you forth, and she has seen to it that you are the image of your mother, knowing that if she madeyou by a hair’s-breadth different, you would see what she is like and judge her. You are Fashion, Fashion herself, blind, fear-full Fashion! You do what you do because others do it; think what you think because others think it; feel what you feel because others feel it. You are the Figure without eyes.
And no one can reach you, no one can alter you, poor little bundle of others’ thoughts; for there is nothing left to reach.
In your seven hundred carriages, you pass; and the road is bright with you. Above that road, below it, and on either hand, are the million things and beings that you cannot see; all that is organic in the world, all that is living and creating, all that is striving to be free. You pass, glittering, on your round, the sightless captive of your own triumph; and the eyes of the hollow-chested work-girls on the pavement fix on you a thousand eager looks, for you are strange to them. Many of their hearts are sore with envy; theydo not know that you are as dead as snow around a crater; they cannot tell you for the nothing that you are—Fashion! The Figure without eyes!
Oftenin the ride of some Scotch wood I used to stand, clutching my gun, with eyes moving from right to left, from left to right. Every nerve and fibre of my body would receive and answer to the slightest movements, the smallest noises, the faintest scents. The acrid sweetness of the spruce-trees in the mist, the bite of innumerable midges, the feel of the deep, wet, mossy heather underfoot, the brown-grey twilight of the wood, the stillness—these were poignant as they never will be again. And slowly, back of that stillness, the noises of the beaters would begin. Gentle and regular, at first—like the ending of a symphony rather than its birth—they would swell, then drop and fade away completely. In that unexpected silence a squirrel scurried outalong a branch, sat a moment looking, and scurried back; or, with its soft, blunt flight, an owl would fly across.
Then, with a shrill, far “Mar-r-rk!” the beaters’ chorus would rise again, drowned for an instant by the crack of the keepers’ guns; louder and louder it came, rhythmically, inexorably nearer. In the ride little shivers of wind shook the drops of warm mist off the needles of the spruce, and a half-veiled sun faintly warmed and coloured everything. Stealing through heather and fern would come a rabbit, confiding in the space before him and the ride where he was wont to sun himself. At a shot he flung his mortal somersault, or disappeared into a burrow, reached too soon. To see him lie there dead in the brown-grey twilight of the trees would give one a strange pleasure—a feeling such as some casual love affair will give a man, the pleasure of a primitive virility expressed—but to watch him disappear into the earth would irritate, for he had got his death, and, dead within the earth, he would not do one any sort of credit.Nor was it nice to think that he was dying slowly, so one forbore to think.
Sometimes we did not shoot at such small stuff, but waited for the roedeer. These dun familiars of the wood were very shy, clinging to the deepest thickets, treading with gentle steps, invisible as spirits, and ever trying to break back. Now and then, leaping forward with hindquarters higher than its shoulders, one of them would face the line of beaters, and then would arise the strangest noises above the customary sounds and tappings—cries of fierce resentment that such fine “game” should thus escape the guns. When the creature crossed the line these cries swelled into a long, continuous, excited shriek; and, as the yells died out in muttering, I used to feel a hollow sense of disappointment.
When the beat was over they would collect the birds and beasts which had fulfilled their destiny, and place them all together. Half hidden by the bracken or deep heather the little bodies lay abandoned to the ground with the wonderfulstrange limpness of dead things. We stood looking at them in the misty air, acrid with the fragrance of the spruce-trees; and each of us would feel a vague strange thirst, a longing to be again standing in the rides with the cries of the beaters in our ears, and creatures coming closer, closer to our guns.
Often in the police-courts I have sat, while they drove another kind of “game.”
It would be quiet in there but for the whisperings and shufflings peculiar to all courts of law. Through the high-placed windows a grey light fell impartially, and in it everything looked hard and shabby. The air smelled of old clothes, and now and then, when the women were brought in, of the corpse of some sweet scent.
Through a door on the left-hand side they would drive these women, one by one, often five or six, even a dozen, in one morning. Some of them would come shuffling forward to the dock with their heads down; others walked boldly; somelooked as if they must faint; some were hard and stoical as stone. They would be dressed in black, quite neatly; or in cheap, rumpled finery; or in skimped, mud-stained garments. Their faces were of every type—dark and short, with high cheek-bones; blowsy from drink; long, worn, and raddled; one here and there like a wild fruit; and many bestially insensible, devoid of any sort of beauty.
They stood, as in southern countries, one may see many mules or asses, harnessed to too-heavy loads of wood or stone, stand, utterly unmoving, with a mute submissive viciousness. Now and then a girl would turn half round towards the public, her lips smiling defiantly, but her eyes never resting for a moment, as though knowing well enough there was no place where theycouldrest. The next to her would seem smitten with a sort of deathlike shame, but there were not many of this kind, for they were those whom the beaters had driven in for the first time. Sometimes they refused tospeak. As a rule they gave their answers in hard voices, their sullen eyes lowered; then, having received the meed of justice, went shuffling or flaunting out.
They were used to being driven, it was their common lot; a little piece of sport growing more frequent with each year that intervened between their present and that moment when some sportsman first caught sight of them and started out to bring them down. From most of them that day was now distant by many thousand miles of pavement, so far off that it was hard work to remember it. What sport they had afforded since! Yet not one of all their faces seemed to show that they saw the fun that lay in their being driven in like this. They were perhaps still grateful, some of them, at the bottom of their hearts for that first moment when they came shyly towards the hunter, who stood holding his breath for fear they should not come; unable from their natures to believe that it was not their business to attract and afford them sport. But suddenly in a pair of greenish eyesand full lips sharpened at their corners, behind the fading paint and powder on a face, one could see the huntress—the soul as of a stealing cat, waiting to flesh its claws in what it could, driven by some deep, insatiable instinct. This one too had known sport; she had loved to spring and bring down the prey just as we who brought her here had loved to hunt her. Nature had put sport into her heart and into ours; and behind that bold or cringing face there seemed to lurk this question: “I only did what you do—what nearly every man of you has done a little, in your time. I only wanted a bit of sport, like you: that’s human nature, isn’t it? Why do you bring me here, when you don’t bring yourselves! Why do you allow me in certain bounds to give you sport, and trap me outside those bounds like vermin? When I was beautiful—and Iwasbeautiful—it was you who begged of me! I gave until my looks were gone. Now that my looks are gone, I have to beg you to come to me, or I must starve; and when I beg, you bringme here. That’s funny isn’t it, d——d funny! I’d laugh, if laughter earned my living; but I can’t afford to laugh, my fellow-sportsmen—the more there are of you the better for me until I’m done for!”
Silently we men would watch—as one may watch rats let out of a cage to be pounced upon by a terrier—their frightened, restless eyes cowed by coming death; their short, frantic rush, soon ended; their tossed, limp bodies! On some of our faces was a jeering curiosity, as though we were saying: “Ah! we thought that you would come to this.” A few faces—not used to such a show—were darkened with a kind of pity. The most were fixed and hard and dull, as of men looking at hurtful things they own and cannot do without. But in all our unmoving eyes could be seen that tightening of fibre, that tenseness, which is the mark of sport. The beaters had well done their work; the game was driven to the gun!
It was but the finish of the hunt, thehunt that we had started, one or other of us, some fine day, the sun shining and the blood hot, wishing no harm to any one, but just a little sport.
Everynight between the hours of two and four he would wake, and lie sleepless, and all his monetary ghosts would come and visit him. If, for instance, he had just bought a house and paid for it, any doubt he had conceived at any time about its antecedents or its future would suddenly appear, squatting on the foot-rail of his bed, staring in his face. There it would grow, until it seemed to fill the room; and terror would grip his heart. The words: “I shall lose my money,” would leap to his lips; but in the dark it seemed ridiculous to speak them. Presently beside that doubt more doubts would squat. Doubts about his other houses, about his shares; misgivings as to Water Boards; terrors over Yankee Rails. They took, fantastically, the shapeof owls, clinging in a line and swaying, while from their wide black gaps of mouth would come the silent chorus: “Money, money, you’ll lose all your money!” His heart would start thumping and fluttering; he would turn his old white head, bury his whisker in the pillow, shut his eyes, and con over such investments as he really could not lose. Then, beside his head half-hidden in the pillow, there would come and perch the spectral bird of some unlikely liability, such as a lawsuit that might drive him into bankruptcy; while, on the other side, touching his silver hair, would squat the yellow fowl of Socialism. Between these two he would lie unmoving, save for that hammering of his heart, till at last would come a drowsiness, and he would fall asleep....
At such times it was always of his money and his children’s and grandchildren’s money that he thought. It was useless to tell himself how few his own wants were, or that it might be better for his children to have to make their way.Such thoughts gave him no relief. His fears went deeper than mere facts; they were religious, as it were, and founded in an innermost belief that, by money only, Nature could be held at bay.
Of this, from the moment when he first made money, his senses had informed him, and slowly, surely, gone on doing so, till his very being was soaked through with the conviction. He might be told on Sundays that money was not everything, but he knew better. Seated in the left-hand aisle, he seemed lost in reverence—a grandchild on either hand, his old knees in quiet trousers, crossed, his white-fringed face a little turned towards the preacher, one neat-gloved hand reposing on his thigh, the other keeping warm a tiny hand thrust into it. But his old brain was far away, busy amongst the Tables of Commandment, telling him how much to spend to get his five per cent. and money back; his old heart was busy with the little hand tucked into his. There was nothing in such sermons, therefore, that could quarrel with his ownreligion, for he did not hear them; and even had he heard them, they would not have quarrelled, his own creed of money being but the natural modern form of a religion that his fathers had interpreted as the laying-up of treasure in the life to come. He was only able nowadays tosaythat he believed in any life to come, so that his commercialism had been forced to find another outlet, and advance a step, in accordance with the march of knowledge.
His religious feeling about money did not make him selfish, or niggardly in any way—it merely urged him to preserve himself—not to take risks that he could reasonably avoid, either in his mode of life, his work, or in the propagation of his children. He had not married until he had a position to offer to the latter, sufficiently secure from changes and chances in this mortal life, and even then he had not been too precipitate, confining the number to three boys, and one welcome girl, in accordance with the increase of his income. In the circles where hemoved, his course of action was so normal that no one had observed the mathematical connection between increasing income and the production and education of his family. Still less had any one remarked the deep and silent process by which there passed from him to them the simple elements of faith.
His children, subtly, and under cover of the manner of a generation which did not mention money in so many words, had sucked in their father’s firm religious instinct, his quiet knowledge of the value of the individual life, his steady and unconscious worship of the means of keeping it alive. Calmly they had sucked it in, and a thing or two besides. So long as he was there they knew they could afford to make a little free with what must come to them by virtue of his creed. When quite small children, they had listened, rather bored, to his simple statements about money and the things it bought; presently that instinct—shared by the very young with dogs and other animals—for having of the best and consorting with their betters, had helped them to see the real sense of what he said. As time went on, they found gentility insisting more and more that this instinct should be concealed; and they began unconsciously to perfect their father’s creed, draping its formal tenets in the undress of an apparent disregard. For the dogma, “Not worth the money!” they would use the words, “Not good enough!” The teaching, “Business first,” they formulated, “Not more pleasure than your income can afford, your health can stand, or your reputation can assimilate.” There was money waiting for them, and they did not feel it necessary to undertake even those “safe” risks which their father had been obliged to take, to make that money. But they were quite to be depended on. In the choosing of their friends, their sports, their clubs, and occupations, a religious feeling guided them. They knew precisely just how much their income was, and took care neither to spend more nor less. And so devoutly did they act up to their principles, that, whetherin the restaurant or country house, whether in the saleroom of a curio shop, whether in their regiments or their offices, they could always feel the presence of the godhead blessing their discreet and comfortable worship. In one respect, indeed, they were more religious than their father, who still preserved the habit of falling on his knees at night, to name with Tibetan regularity a strange god; they did not speak to him about this habit, but they wished he would not do it, being fond of their old father, who continued them into the past. They had gently laughed him out of talking about money, they had gently laughed at him for thinking of it still; but they loved him, and it worried them in secret that he should do this thing, which seemed to them dishonest.
With their wives and husband—in course of time they had all married—they very often came to see him, bringing their children. To the old man these little visitors were worth more than all hydropathy; to help in playing with the toysthat he himself had given them, to stroke his grandsons’ yellow heads, and ride them on his knee; to press his silver whiskers to their ruddy cheeks, pinching their little legs to feel how much there was of them, and loving them the more, the more there was to love—this made his heart feel warm. The dearest moments, he knew now, the consolation of his age, were those he spent reflecting how—of the young things he loved, who seemed to love him too a little—not one would have secured to him or her less than twelve or thirteen hundred pounds a year; more, if he could manage to hold on a little longer. For fifty years at least the flesh and blood he left behind would be secure. His eye and mind, quick to notice things like that, had soon perceived the difference of the younger generation’s standards from his own; his children had perhaps a deeper veneration for the means of living while they were alive, but certainly less faith in keeping up their incomes after they were in their graves. And so, unconsciously, his speculationpassed them by, and travelled to his grandchildren, telling itself that these small creatures who nestled up against him, and sometimes took him walks, would, when they came to be grown men and women, have his simpler faith, and save the money that he left them, for their own grandchildren. Thus, and thus only, would he live, not fifty years, but a hundred, after he was dead. But he was rendered very anxious by the law, which refused to let him tie his money up in perpetuity.
Firm in his determination to secure himself against the future, he opposed this strenuous piety to those temptations which beset the individual, refusing numberless appeals, often much against his instincts of compassion; opposing with his vote and all his influence movements to increase the rates or income-tax for such purposes as the raising of funds to enable aged people without means to die more slowly. He himself, who laid up yearly more and more for the greater safety of his family, felt, no doubt—though cynicism shocked him—that these old persons were only an encumbrance totheirfamilies, and should be urged to dwindle gently out. In such private cases as he came across, feeling how hard it was, he prayed for strength to keep his hand out of his pocket, and strength was often given him. So with many other invitations to depart from virtue. He fixed a certain sum a year—a hundred pounds—with half-a-crown in the velvet bag on Sundays—to be offered as libations to all strange gods, so that they might leave him undisturbed to worship the true god of money. This was effectual; the strange gods, finding him a man of strong religious principle, yet no crank—his name appeared in twenty charitable lists, five pounds apiece—soon let him be, for fear of wasting postage stamps and the under parts of boots.
After his wife’s death, which came about when he was seventy, he continued to reside alone in the house that he had lived in since his marriage, though it was now too large for him. Every autumnhe resolved to make a change next spring; but when spring came, he could not bring himself to tear his old roots up, and put it off till the spring following, with the hope, perhaps, that he might then feel more inclined.
All through the years that he was living there alone, he suffered more and more from those nightly visitations, of monetary doubts. They seemed, indeed, to grow more concrete and insistent with every thousand pounds he put between himself and their reality. They became more owl-like, more numerous, with each fresh investment; they stayed longer at a time. And he grew thinner, frailer, every year; pouches came beneath his eyes.
When he was eighty, his daughter, with her husband and children, came to live with him. This seemed to give him a fresh lease of life. He never missed, if he could help it, a visit to the nursery at five o’clock. There, surrounded by toy bricks, he would remain an hour or more, building—banks or houses, ships or churches, sometimes police-stations,sometimes cemeteries, but generally banks. And when the edifice approached completion, in the glory of its long white bricks, he waited with a sort of secret ecstasy to feel a small warm body climb his back, and hear a small voice say in his ear: “What shall we put in the bank to-day, Granddy?”
The first time this was asked, he had hesitated long before he answered. During the thirty years that had elapsed since he built banks for his own children, he had learned that one did not talk of money now, especially before the young. One used a euphemism for it. The proper euphemism had been slow to spring into his mind, but it had sprung at last; and they had placed it in the bank. It was a very little china dog. They placed it in the entrance hall.
The small voice said: “What is it guarding?”
He had answered: “The bank, my darling.”
The small voice murmured: “But nobody could steal the bank.”
Looking at the little euphemism, he had frowned. It lacked completeness as a symbol. For a moment he had a wild desire to put a sixpence down, and end the matter. Two small knees wriggled against his back, arms tightened round his neck, a chin rubbed itself impatiently against his whisker. He muttered hastily:
“But they could steal the papers.”
“What papers?”
“The wills, and deeds, and—and cheques.”
“Where are they?”
“In the bank.”
“I don’t see them.”
“They’re in a cupboard.”
“What are they for?”
“For—for grown-up people.”
“Are they to play with?”
“NO!”
“Why is he guarding them?”
“So that—so that everybody can always have enough to eat.”
“Everybody?”
“Everybody.”
“Me, too?”
“Yes, my darling; you, of course.”
Locked in each other’s arms they looked down sidelong at the little euphemism. The small voice said:
“Now thathe’sthere, they’re safe, aren’t they?”
“Quite safe.”
He had given up attending to his business, but almost every morning, at nearly the same hour, he would walk down to his club, not looking very much at things about the streets, partly because his thoughts were otherwise engaged, partly because he had found it from the first a deleterious habit, tending to the overcultivation of the social instincts. Arriving, he would take theTimesand theFinancial News, and go to his pet armchair; here he would stay till lunch-time, reading all that bore in any way on his affairs, and taking a grave view of every situation. But at lunch a longing to express himself would come, and he would tell his neighbours tales of his little grandsons, of the extraordinary things they did,and of the future he was laying up for them. In the pleasant warmth of mid-day, over his light but satisfying lunch, surrounded by familiar faces, he would recount these tales in cheerful tones, and his old grey eyes would twinkle; between him and his struggle with those nightly apparitions, there were many hours of daylight, there was his visit to the nursery. But, suddenly, looking up fixedly with strained eyes, he would put a question such as this: “Do you ever wake up in the night?” If the answer were affirmative, he would say: “Do you ever find things worry you then out of—out of all proportion?” And, if they did, he would clearly be relieved to hear it. On one occasion, when he had elicited an emphatic statement of the discomfort of such waking hours, he blurted out: “You don’t ever see a lot of great owls sitting on your bed, I suppose?” Then, seemingly ashamed of what he had just asked, he rose, and left his lunch unfinished.
His fellow-members, though nearly all much younger than himself, had no unkindly feeling for him. He seemed to them, perhaps, to overrate their interest in his grandsons and the state of his investments; but they knew he could not help preoccupation with these subjects; and when he left them, usually at three o’clock, saying almost tremulously: “I must be off; my grandsons will be looking out for me!” they would exchange looks as though remarking: “The old chap thinks of nothing but his grandchildren.” And they would sit down to “bridge,” taking care to play within the means their fathers had endowed them with.
But the “old chap” would step into a hansom, and his spirit, looking through his eyes beneath the brim of his tall hat, would travel home before him. Yet, for all his hurry, he would find the time to stop and buy a toy or something on the way.
One morning, at the end of a cold March, they found him dead in bed, propped on his pillows, with his eyes wide open. Doctors, hastily called in, decided that he had died from failure ofheart action, and fixed the hour of death at anything from two to four; by the appearance of his staring pupils they judged that something must have frightened him. No one had heard a noise, no one could find a sign of anything alarming; so no one could explain why he, who seemed so well preserved, should thus have suddenly collapsed. To his own family he had never told the fact, that every night he woke between the hours of two and four, to meet a row of owls squatting on the foot-rail of his bed—he was, no doubt, ashamed of it. He had revealed much of his religious feeling, but not the real depth of it; not the way his deity of money had seized on his imagination; not his nightly struggles with the terrors of his spirit, nor the hours of anguish spent, when vitality was low, trying to escape the company of doubts. No one had heard the fluttering of his heart, which, beginning many years ago, just as a sort of pleasant habit to occupy his wakeful minutes in the dark, had grown to be like the beating of a hammeron soft flesh. No one had guessed, he least of all, the stroke of irony that Nature had prepared to avenge the desecration of her law of balance. She had watched his worship from afar, and quietly arranged that by his worship he should be destroyed; careless, indeed, what god he served, knowing only that he served too much.
They brought the eldest of his little grandsons in. He stood a long time looking, then asked if he might touch the cheek. Being permitted, he kissed his little finger-tip and laid it on the old man’s whisker. When he was led away and the door closed, he asked if “Granddy” were “quite safe”; and twice again that evening he asked this question.
In the early light next morning, before the house was up, the under-housemaid saw a white thing on the mat before the old man’s door. She went, and stooping down, examined it. It was the little china dog.
Motorcars were crossing the Downs to Goodwood Races. Slowly they mounted, sending forth an oily reek, a jerky grinding sound; and a cloud of dust hung over the white road. Since ten o’clock they had been mounting, one by one, freighted with the pale conquerors of time and space. None paused on the top of the green heights, but with a convulsive shaking leaped, and glided swiftly down; and the tooting of their valves and the whirring of their wheels spread on either hand along the hills.
But from the clump of beech-trees on the very top nothing of their progress could be heard, and nothing seen; only a haze of dust trailing behind them like a hurried ghost.
Amongst the smooth grey beech-stemsof that grove were the pallid forms of sheep, and it was cool and still as in a temple. Outside, the day was bright, and a hundred yards away in the hot sun the shepherd, a bent old man in an aged coat, was leaning on his stick. His brown face wrinkled like a walnut, was fringed round with a stubble of grey beard. He stood very still, and waited to be spoken to.
“A fine day?”
“Aye, fine enough; a little sun won’t do no harm. ’Twon’t last!”
“How can you tell that?”
“I been upon the Downs for sixty year!”
“You must have seen some changes?”
“Changes in men—an’ sheep!”
“An’ wages, too, I suppose. What were they when you were twenty?”
“Eight shillin’ a week.”
“But living was surely more expensive?”
“So ’twas; the bread was mortial dear, I know, an’ the flour black! An’ piecrust, why, ’twas hard as wood!”
“And what are wages now?”
“There’s not a man about the Downs don’t get his sixteen shillin’; some get a pound, some more.... There they go! Sha’n’t get ’em out now till tew o’clock!” His sheep were slipping one by one into the grove of beech-trees where, in the pale light, no flies tormented them. The shepherd’s little dark-grey eyes seemed to rebuke his flock because they would not feed the whole day long.
“It’s cool in there. Some say that sheep is silly. ’Tain’t so very much that they don’t know.”
“So you think the times have changed?”
“Well! There’s a deal more money in the country.”
“And education?”
“Ah! Ejucation? They spend all day about it. Look at the railways too, an’ telegraphs! See! That’s bound to make a difference.”
“So, things are better, on the whole?”
He smiled.
“I was married at twenty, on eight shillin’ a week; you won’t find them doing such a thing as that these days—theywant their comforts now. There’s not the spirit of content about of forty or fifty years agone. All’s for movin’ away an’ goin’ to the towns; an’ when they get there, from what I’ve heard, they wish as they was back; but they don’t never come.”
There was no complaining in his voice; rather, a matter-of-fact and slightly mocking tolerance.
“You’ll see none now that live their lives up on the Downs an’ never want to change. The more they get the more they want. They smell the money these millioneers is spendin’—seems to make ’em think they can do just anythin’ ’s long as they get some of it themselves. Times past, a man would do his job, an’ never think because his master was rich that he could cheat him; he gave a value for his wages, to keep well with himself. Now, a man thinks because he’s poor he ought to ha’ been rich, and goes about complainin’, doin’ just as little as he can. It’s my belief they get their notions from the daily papers—hear too muchof all that’s goin’ on—it onsettles them; they read about this Sawcialism, an’ these millioneers; it makes a pudden’ in their heads. Look at the beer that’s drunk about it. For one gallon that was drunk when I was young there’s twenty gallon now. The very sheep ha’ changed since I remember; not one o’ them ewes you see before you there, that isn’t pedigree—and the care that’s taken o’ them! They’d have me think that men’s improvin’, too; richer they may be, but what’s the use o’ riches if your wants are bigger than your purse? A man’s riches is the things he does without an’ never misses.”
And crouching on his knee, he added:
“Ther’ goes the last o’ them; sha’n’t get ’em out now till tew o’clock. One gone—all go!”
Then squatting down, as though responsibility were at an end, he leaned one elbow on the grass, his eyes screwed up against the sun. And in his old brown face, with its myriad wrinkles and square chin, there was a queer contentment, as though approving the perversity of sheep.
“So riches don’t consist in man’s possessions, but in what he doesn’t want? You are an enemy of progress?”
“These Downs don’t change—’tis only man that changes; what good’s he doin’, that’s what I ask meself—he’s makin’ wants as fast as ever he makes riches.”
“Surely a time must come when he will see that to be really rich his supply must be in excess of his demand? When he sees that, he will go on making riches, but control his wants.”
He paused to see if there were any meaning in such words, then answered:
“On these Downs I been, man an’ boy, for sixty year.”
“And are you happy?”
He wrinkled up his brows and smiled.
“What age d’ you think I am? Seventy-six!”
“You look as if you’d live to be a hundred.”
“Can’t expect it! My health’s good though, ’cept for these.”
Like wind-bent boughs all the fingers of both his hands from the top joint to the tip were warped towards the thumb.
“Looks funny! But I don’t feel ’em. What you don’t feel don’t trouble you.”
“What caused it?”
“Rheumatiz! I don’t make nothin’ of it. Where there’s doctors there’s disease.”
“Then you think we make our ailments, too, as fast as we make remedies?”
He slowly passed his gnarled hand over the short grass.
“My missus ’ad the doctor when she died.... See that dust? That’s motorcars bringin’ folks to Goodwood Races. Wonderful quick-travellin’ things.”
“Ah! That was a fine invention, surely?”
“There’s some believes in them. But if they folk weren’t doin’ everything and goin’ everywhere at once, there’d be no need for them rampagin’ motors.”
“Have you ever been in one yourself?”
His eyes began to twinkle mockingly.
“I’d like to get one here on a snowywinter’s day, when ye’ve to find your way by sound and smell; there’s things up here they wouldn’t make so free with. They say from London ye can get to anywhere. But there’s things no man can ride away from. Downs ’ll be left when they’re all gone.... Never been off the Downs meself.”
“Don’t you ever feel you’d like to go?”
“There isn’t not hardly one as knows what these Downs are. I see the young men growin’ up, but they won’t stay on ’em; I see folk comin’ down, same as yourself, to look at ’em.”
“Whatarethey, then—these Downs?”
His little eyes, that saw so vastly better than my eyes, deepened in his walnut-coloured face. Fixed on those grey-green Downs, that reigned serene above the country spread below in all its little fields, and woods, and villages, they answered for him. It was long before he spoke.
“Healthiest spot in England!... Talkin’ you was of progress; but look at bacon—four times the price now thatever it was when I were young. And families—thirteen we had, my missus and meself; nowadays if they have three or four it’s as much as ever they’ll put up with. The country’s changed.”
“Does that surprise you? When you came up here this morning the sun was just behind that clump of beech—it’s travelled on since then.”
He looked at it.
“There’s no puttin’ of it back, I guess, if that’s your meaning? It were risin’ then, an’ now it’s gone past noon.”
“Joshua made the sun stand still; it was a great achievement!”
“May well say that; won’t never be done again, I’m thinkin’. And as to knowin’ o’ the time o’ day, them ewes they know it better than ever humans do; at tew o’clock exact you’ll see them comin’ out again to feed.”
“Ah! well—I must be getting on. Good-bye!”
His little eyes began to twinkle with a sort of friendly mockery.
“Ye’re like the country, all for movin’ on your way! Well, keep on, along the tops—ye can’t make no mistake!”
He gave me his old gnarled hand, whose finger-tips were so strangely warped. Then, leaning on his stick, he fixed his eyes upon the beech grove, where his ewes were lying in the cool.
Beyond him in the sun the hazy line of dust trailed across the grey-green Downs, and on the rising breeze came the far-off music of the cars.