Let us look at Mr. and Mrs. Smith one evening when they are by themselves, leaving the children entirely out of account. For in addition to being father and mother, they are husband and wife. Not that I wish to examine the whole institution of marriage—people who dare to do so deserve the Victoria Cross! My concern is simply with the effects of the organisation of the home—on marriage and other things.
Well, you see them together. Mr. Smith has done earning money for the day, and Mrs. Smith has done spending it. They are at leisure to enjoy this home of theirs. This is what Mr. Smith passes seven hours a day at business for. This is what he got married for. This is what he wanted when he decided to take Mrs. Smith, if he could get her. These hours ought to be the flower of their joint life. How are these hours affected by the organisation of the home?
I will tell you how Mrs. Smith is affected. Mrs. Smith is worried by it. And in addition she is conscious that her efforts are imperfectly appreciated, and her difficulties unrealised. As regards the directing and daily recreation of the home, Mr. Smith’s attitude on this evening by the domestic hearth is at best one of armed neutrality. His criticism is seldom other than destructive. Mr. Smith is a strange man. If he went to a lot of trouble to get a small holding under the Small Holdings Act, and then left the cultivation of the ground to another person not scientifically trained to agriculture he would be looked upon as a ninny. When a man takes up a hobby, he ought surely to be terrifically interested in it. What is Mr. Smith’s home but his hobby?
He has put Mrs. Smith in to manage it. He himself, once a quarter, discharges the complicated and delicate function of paying the rent. All the rest, the little matters, such as victualling and brightening—trifles, nothings!—he leaves to Mrs. Smith. He is not satisfied with Mrs. Smith’s activities, and he does not disguise the fact. He is convinced that Mrs. Smith spends too much, and that she is not businesslike. He is convinced that running a house is child’s play compared to whathehas to do. Now, as to Mrs. Smith being unbusinesslike, is Mr. Smith himself businesslike? If he is, he greatly differs from his companions in the second-class smoker. The average office and the average works are emphatically not run on business lines, except in theory. Daily experience proves this. The businesslikeness of the average business man is a vast and hollow pretence.
Besides, who could expect Mrs. Smith to be businesslike? She was never taught to be businesslike. Mr. Smith was apprenticed, or indentured, to his vocation. But Mrs. Smith wasn’t. Mrs. Smith has to feed a family, and doesn’t know the principles of diet. She has to keep children in health, and couldn’t describe their organs to save her life. She has to make herself and the home agreeable to the eye, and knows nothing artistic about colour or form.
I am an ardent advocate of Mrs. Smith. The marvel is not that Mrs. Smith does so badly, but that she does so well. If women were not more conscientious than men in their duties Mr. Smith’s home would be more amateurish than it is, and Mr. Smith’s “moods” more frequent than they are. For Mrs. Smith is amateurish. Example: Mrs. Smith is bothered to death by the daily question, What can we have for dinner? She splits her head in two in order to avoid monotony. Mrs. Smith’srépertoireprobably consists of about 50 dishes, and if she could recall them all to her mind at once her task would be much simplified. But she can’t think of them when she wants to think of them. Supposing that in Mrs. Smith’s kitchen hung a card containing a list of all her dishes, she could run her eyes over it and choose instantly what dishes would suit that day’s larder. Did you ever see such a list in Mrs. Smith’s kitchen? No. The idea has not occurred to Mrs. Smith!
I say also that to spend money efficiently is quite as difficult as to earn it efficiently. Any fool can, somehow, earn a sovereign, but to get value for a sovereign in small purchases means skill and immense knowledge. Mr. Smith has never had experience of the difficulty of spending money efficiently. Most of Mr. Smith’s payments are fixed and mechanical. Mrs. Smith is the spender. Mr. Smith chiefly exercises his skill as a spender in his clothes and in tobacco. Look at the result. Any showy necktie shop and furiously-advertised tobacco is capable of hood-winking Mr. Smith.
In further comparison of their respective “jobs” it has to be noted that Mrs. Smith’s is rendered doubly difficult by the fact that she is always at close quarters with the caprices of human nature. Mrs. Smith is continually bumping up against human nature in various manifestations. The human butcher-boy may arrive late owing to marbles, and so the dinner must either be late or the meat undercooked; or Mr. Smith, through too much smoking, may have lost his appetite, and veal out of Paradise wouldn’t please him! Mrs. Smith’s job is transcendently delicate.
In fine, though Mrs. Smith’s job is perhaps not quite so difficult as she fancies it to be, it is much more difficult than Mr. Smith fancies it to be. And if it is not as well done as she thinks, it is much better done than Mr. Smith thinks. But she will never persuade Mr. Smith that he is wrong until Mr. Smith condescends to know what he is talking about in the discussion of household matters. Mr. Smith’s opportunities of criticism are far too ample; or, at any rate, he makes use of them unfairly, and not as a man of honour. Supposing that Mrs. Smith finished all her work at four o’clock, and was free to stroll into Mr. Smith’s place of business and criticise there everything that did not please her! (It is true that she wouldn’t know what she was talking about; but neither does Mr. Smith at home; at home Mr. Smith finds pride in not knowing what he is talking about.) Mr. Smith would have a bit of a “time” between four and six.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith are united by a genuine affection. But their secret attitudes on the subject of home management cause that affection, by a constant slight friction, to wear thin. It must be so. And it will be so until (a) Mr. Smith deigns to learn the business of his home; (b) Mr. Smith ceases to expect Mrs. Smith to perform miracles; (c) Mrs. Smith ceases to be an amateur in domestic economy—i. e., until domestic economy becomes the principal subject in the upper forms of the average girls’ school.
At present the organisation of the home is an agency against the triumph of marriage as an institution.
You may have forgotten young Harry Smith, whom I casually mentioned in my first section, the schoolboy of fifteen. I should not be surprised to hear that you had forgotten him. He is often forgotten in the home of the Smiths., Compared with Mr. Smith, the creator of the home, or with the lordly eldest son John, who earns his own living and is nearly engaged, or with Mary, who actually is engaged, young Harry is unimportant. Still, his case is very interesting, and his own personal impression of the home of the Smiths must be of value. .
Is Harry Smith happy in the home? Of course, one would not expect him to be perfectly happy. But is he as happy as circumstances in themselves allow? My firm answer is that he is not. I am entirely certain that on the whole Harry Smith regards home as a fag, a grind, and a bore. Mr. Smith, on reading these lines, is furious, and Mrs. Smith is hurt. What! Our dear Harry experiences tedium and disappointment with his dear parents? Nonsense!
The fact is, no parents will believe that their children are avoidably unhappy. It is universally agreed nowadays, that children in the eighteenth century, and in the first half of the nineteenth, had a pretty bad time under the sway of their elders. But the parent of those epochs would have been indignant at any accusation of ill-treatment. He would have called his sway beneficent and his affection doting. The same with Mr. and Mrs. Smith! Now, I do not mean, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, that you crudely ill-treat your son, tying him to posts, depriving him of sleep, or pulling chestnuts out of the fire with his fingers. (See reports of S.P.C.C.) A thousand times, no! You are softhearted. Mrs. Smith is occasionally somewhat too soft-hearted. Still, I maintain that you ill-treat Harry in a very subtle, moral way, by being fundamentally unjust to him in your own minds.
Just look at your Harry, my excellent and conscientious Mr. Smith. He is all alive there, a real human being, not a mechanical doll; he has feelings just like yours, only, perhaps, more sensitive. He finds himself in a world which—well, of which the less said the better.Youknow what the world is, Mr. Smith, and you have often said what you know. He is in this world, and he can’t get out of it. You have started him on the dubious adventure, and he has got to go through with it. And what is the reason of his being here? Did you start him out of a desire to raise citizens for the greatest of empires? Did you imagine he would enjoy it hugely? Did you act from a sense of duty to the universe? None of these things, Mr. Smith! Your Harry is merely here because you thought that Mrs. Smith was somehow charmingly different from other girls. He is a consequence of your egotistic desire to enlarge your borders, of your determination to have what you wanted. Every time you cast eyes on him he ought to remind you what a self-seeking and consequence-scorning person you are, Mr. Smith. And not only is he from no choice or wish of his own in a world as to which the most powerful intellects are still arguing whether it is tragic or ridiculous; but he is unarmed for the perils of the business. He is very ignorant and very inexperienced, and he is continually passing through disconcerting modifications.
These are the facts, my dear sir. You cannot deny that you, for your own satisfaction, have got Harry into a rather fearful mess. Do you constantly make the effort to be sympathetic to this helpless victim of your egotism? You do not. And what is worse, to quiet your own consciences, both you and Mrs. Smith are for ever pouring into his ear a shocking—I won’t call it “lie”—perversion of the truth. You are always absurdly trying to persuade him that the obligation is on his side. Not a day wears to night but Mrs. Smith expresses to Harry her conviction that by good behaviour he ought to prove hisgratitudeto you for being such a kind father.
And you talk to him in the same strain of Mrs. Smith. The sum of your teaching is an insinuation—often more than an insinuation—that you have conferred a favour on Harry, Supposing that some one pitched you into the Ship Canal—one of the salubrious reaches near Warrington, Mr. Smith—and then clumsily dragged you half-way out, and punctured his efforts by a reiterated statement that gratitude to him ought to fill your breast, how would you feel?
Things are better than they were, but the general attitude of the parent to the child is still fundamentally insincere, and it mars the success of the home, for it engenders in the child a sense of injustice. Do you fancy that Harry is for an instant deceived by the rhetoric of his parents? Not he! Children are very difficult to deceive, and they are horribly frank to themselves. It is quite bad enough for Harry to be compelled to go to school. Harry, however, has enough sense to perceive that he must go to school. But when his parents begin to yarn that he ought to begladto go to school, that he ought toenjoythe privilege of solving quadratic equations and learning the specific gravities of elements, he is quite naturally alienated.
He does not fail to observe that in a hundred things the actions of his parents contradict their precepts. When, being a boy, he behaves like a hoy, and his parents affect astonishment and disgust, he knows it is an affectation. When his father, irritated by a superabundance of noise, frowns and instructs Harry to get away for he is tired of the sight of him, Harry is excusably affronted in his secret pride.
These are illustrations of the imperfect success of the Smiths’ home as an organisation for making Harry happy. Useless for Mr. Smith to argue that it is “all for Harry’s own good.” He would simply be aggravating his offence. Discipline, the enforcement of regulations, is necessary for Harry. I strongly favour discipline. But discipline can be practised with sympathy or without sympathy; with or without the accompaniment of hypocritical remarks that deceive no one; with or without odious assumptions of superiority and philanthropy.
I trust that young John and young Mary will take note, and that their attitude totheirHarrys will be, not: “You ought to be glad you’re alive,” but: “We thoroughly sympathise with your difficulties. We quite agree that these rules and prohibitions and injunctions are a nuisance for you, but they will save you trouble later, and we will be as un-cast-iron as we can.” Honesty is the best policy.
The cry is that the institution of the home is being undermined, and that, therefore, society is in the way of perishing. It is stated that the home is insidiously attacked, at one end of the scale, by the hotel and restaurant habit, and, at the other, by such innovations as the feeding-of-school-children habit. We are asked to contemplate the crowded and glittering dining-rooms of the Midland, the Carlton, the Adelphi, on, for instance, Christmas Night, when, of all nights, people ought! to be on their own hearths, and we are told: “It has come to this. This! is the result of the craze for pleasure! Where is the home now?”
To which my reply would be that the home remains just about where it was. The spectacular existence of a few great hotels has never mirrored the national life. Is the home of the Smiths, for example, being gradually overthrown by the restaurant habit? The restaurant habit will only strengthen the institution of the home. The most restaurant-loving people on the face of the earth are the French, and the French home is a far more powerful, more closely-knit organisation than our own. Why! Up to last year a Frenchman of sixty could not marry without the consent of his parents, if they happened to be alive. I wonder what the Smiths would say to that as an example of the disintegration of the home by the restaurant habit!
Most assuredly the modest, medium, average home founded by Mr. Smith has not been in the slightest degree affected either by the increase of luxury and leisure, or by any alleged meddlesomeness on the part of the State. The home founded by Mr. Smith, with all its faults—and I have not spared them—is too convenient, too economical, too efficient, and, above all, too natural, to be overthrown, or even shaken, by either luxury or grandmotherliness. To change the metaphor and call it a ship, it remains absolutely right and tight. It is true that Mr. and Mrs. Smith assert sadly that young John and young Mary have much more liberty thantheyever had, but Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s parents asserted exactly the same thing of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and their grandparents of their parents, and so on backwards doubtless up to Noah. That is only part of a process, a beneficent process.
Nevertheless, the home of the Smiths has a very real enemy, and that enemy is not outside, but inside. That enemy is Matilda. I have not hitherto discussed Matilda. She sleeps in the attic, and earns £18 a year, rising to £20. She doesn’t count, and yet she is the factor which, more than any other, will modify the home of the Smiths.
Let me say no word against Matilda. She is a respectable and a passably industrious, and a passably obedient girl. I know her. She usually opens the door for me, and we converse “like anything”! “Good evening, Matilda,” I say to her. “Good evening, sir,” says she. And in her tone and mine is an implicit recognition of the fact that I have been very good-natured and sympathetic in greeting her as a human being. “Mr. Smith in?” I ask, smiling. “Yes, sir. Will you come this way?” says she. Then I forget her. A nice, pleasant girl! And she has a good place, too. The hygienic conditions are superior to those of a mill, and the labour less fatiguing. And both Mrs. Smith and Miss Mary, help her enormously in “little ways.” She eats better food than she would eat at home, and she has a bedroom all to herself. You might say she was on velvet.
And yet, in the middle of one of those jolly, unaffected evenings that I occasionally spend with the Smiths, when the piano has been going, and I have helped Mrs. Smith to cheat herself at patience, and given Mr. Smith the impression that he can teach me a thing or two, and discussed cigarettes with John, and songs with Mary, and the sense of intimate fellowship and mutual comprehension is in the air, in comes Matilda suddenly with a tray of coffee—and makes me think furiously! She goes out as rapidly as she came in, for she is bound by an iron law not to stop an instant, and if she happened to remark in a friendly, human way: “You seem to be having a good time here!”
All the Smiths, and I too, would probably drop down dead from pained shock.
But though she is gone I continue to think furiously. Where had she been all the jolly evening? Where has she returned to? Well, to her beautiful hygienic kitchen, where she sits or works all by herself, on velvet. My thoughts follow her existence through the day, and I remember that from morn till onerous eve she must not, save on business, speak unless she is spoken to. Then I give up thinking about Matilda’s case, because it annoys me. I recall a phrase of young John’s; he is youthfully interested in social problems, and he wants a latch-key vote. Said John to me once, when another Matilda had left: “Of course, if one thought too much about Matilda’s case, one wouldn’t be able to sleep at nights.”
When you visit the Smiths the home seems always to be in smooth working order. But ask Mrs. Smith! Ask Mary! Get beneath the surface. And you will glimpse the terrible trouble that lies concealed. Mrs. Smith began with Matilda the First. Are you aware that this is Matilda the Fortieth, and that between Matilda the Fortieth and Matilda the Forty-first there will probably be an interregnum? Mrs. Smith simply cannot get Matildas. And when by happy chance she does get a Matilda, the misguided girl won’t see the velvet with which the kitchen and the attic are carpeted.
Mrs. Smith says the time will come when the race of Matildas will have disappeared. And Mrs. Smith is right. The “general servant” is bound to disappear utterly. In North America she has already almost disappeared. Think of that! Instead of her, in many parts of the American continent, there is an independent stranger who, if she came to the Smiths, would have the ineffable impudence to eat at the same table as the Smiths, just as though she was of the same clay, and who, when told to do something, would be quite equal to snapping out: “Do it yourself.”
But you say that the inconvenience brought about by the disappearance of Matilda would be too awful to contemplate. I venture to predict that the disappearance of Matilda will not exhaust the resources of civilisation. The home will continue. But mechanical invention will have to be quickened in order to replace Matilda’s red hands. And there will be those suburban restaurants! And I have a pleasing vision of young John, in the home whichhebuilds, cleaning his own boots. Inconvenient, but it is coming!
Upon an evening in early autumn, I, who had never owned an orchard before, stood in my orchard; behind me were a phalanx of some sixty trees bearing (miraculously, to my simplicity) a fine crop of apples and plums—my apples and plums, and a mead of some two acres, my mead, upon which I discerned possibilities of football and cricket; behind these was a double greenhouse containing three hundred pendent bunches of grapes of the dark and aristocratic variety which I thought I had seen in Piccadilly ticketed at four shillings a pound—my grapes; still further behind uprose the chimneys of a country-house, uncompromisingly plain and to some eyes perhaps ugly, but my country-house, the lease of which, stamped, was in my pocket. Immediately in front of me was a luxuriant hedge which, long unclipped, had attained a height of at least fifteen feet. Beyond the hedge the ground fell away sharply into a draining ditch, and on the other side of the ditch, through the interstices of the hedge, I perceived glimpses of a very straight and very white highway.
This highway was Watling Street, built of the Romans, and even now surviving as the most famous road in England. I had “learnt” it at school, and knew that it once ran from Dover to London, from London to Chester and from Chester to York. Just recently I had tracked it diligently on a series of county maps, and discovered that, though only vague fragments of it remained in Kent, Surrey, Shropshire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire, it still flourished and abounded exceedingly in my particular neighbourhood as a right line, austere, renowned, indispensable, clothed in its own immortal dust. I could see but patches of it in the twilight, but I was aware that it stretched fifteen miles southeast of me, and unnumbered miles northwest of me, with scarcely a curve to break the splendid inexorable monotony of its career. To me it was a wonderful road—more wonderful than the Great North Road, or the military road from Moscow to Vladivostock. And the most wonderful thing about it was that I lived on it. After all, few people can stamp the top of their notepaper, “Watling Street, England.” It is not a residential thoroughfare.
Only persons of imagination can enter into my feelings at that moment. I had spent two-thirds of my life in a town (squalid, industrial) and the remaining third in Town. I thought I knew every creosoted block in Fleet Street, every bookstall in Shoreditch, every hosier’s in Piccadilly. I certainly did know the order of stations on the Inner Circle, the various frowns of publishers, the strange hysteric, silly atmosphere of theatrical first-nights, and stars of the Empire and Alhambra (by sight), and the vicious odours of a thousand and one restaurants. And lo! burdened with all this accumulated knowledge, shackled by all these habits, associations, entrancements, I was yet moved by some mysterious and far-off atavism to pack up, harness the oxen, “trek,” and go and live in “the country.”
Of course I soon discovered that there is no such thing as “the country,” just as there is no such thing as Herbert Spencer’s “state.”
“The country” is an entity which exists only in the brains of an urban population, whose members ridiculously regard the terrene surface as a concatenation of towns surrounded by earthy space. There is England, and there are spots on England called towns: that is all. But at that time I too had the illusion of “the country,” a district where one saw “trees,” “flowers,” and “birds.” For me, a tree was not an oak or an ash or an elm or a birch or a chestnut; it was just a “tree.” For me there were robins, sparrows, and crows; the rest of the winged fauna was merely “birds.” I recognised roses, daisies, dandelions, forget-me-nots, chrysanthemums, and one or two more blossoms; all else was “flowers.” Remember that all this happened before the advent of the nature-book and the sublime invention of week-ending, and conceive me plunging into this unknown, inscrutable, and recondite “country,” as I might have plunged fully clothed and unable to swim into the sea. It was a prodigious adventure! When my friends asked me, with furtive glances at each other as in the presence of a lunatic, why I was going to live in the country, I could only reply: “Because I want to. I want to see what it’s like.” I might have attributed my action to the dearness of season-tickets on the Underground, to the slowness of omnibuses or the danger of cabs: my friends would have been just as wise, and I just as foolish, in their esteem. I admit that their attitude of benevolent contempt, of far-seeing sagacity, gave me to think. And although I was obstinate, it was with a pang of misgiving that I posted the notice of quitting my suburban residence; and the pang was more acute when I signed the contract for the removal of my furniture. I called on my friends before the sinister day of exodus.
“Good-bye,” I said.
“Au revoir,” they replied, with calm vaticinatory assurance, “we shall see you back again in a year.”
Thus, outwardly braggart, inwardly quaking, I departed. The quaking had not ceased as I stood, in the autumn twilight, in my beautiful orchard, in front of my country-house. Toiling up the slope from the southward, I saw an enormous van with three horses: the last instalment of my chattels. As it turned lumberingly at right angles into my private road or boreen, I said aloud:
“I’ve done it.”
I had. I felt like a statesman who has handed an ultimatum to a king’s messenger. No withdrawal was now possible. From the reverie natural to this melancholy occasion I was aroused by a disconcerting sound of collision, the rattle of chains, and the oaths customary to drivers in a difficulty. I ran towards the house and down the weedy drive bordered by trees which a learned gardener had told me were of the variety,cupressus lawsoniana. In essaying the perilous manoeuvre of twisting round three horses and a long van on a space about twenty feet square, the driver had overset the brick pier upon which swung my garden-gate. The unicorn horse of the team was nosing at the cupressus lawsoniana and the van was scotched in the gateway. I thought, “This is an omen.” I was, however, reassured by the sight of two butchers and two bakers each asseverating that nothing could afford him greater pleasure than to call every day for orders. A minute later the postman, in his own lordly equipage, arrived with my newspapers and his respects. I tore open a paper and read news of London. I convinced myself that London actually existed, though I were never to see it again. The smashing of the pier dwindled from a catastrophe to an episode.
The next morning very early I was in Watling Street. Since then
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
but this was the first in the sequence of those Shaksperean mornings, and it was also, subjectively, the finest. I shall not describe it, since, objectively and in the quietude of hard fact, I now perceive that it could not have been in the least remarkable. The sun rose over the southward range which Bunyan took for the model of his Delectable Mountains, and forty or fifty square miles of diversified land was spread out in front of me. The road cut down for a couple of miles like a geometrician’s rule, and disappeared in a slight S curve, the work of a modern generation afraid of gradients, on to the other side of the Delectable Mountains. I thought: “How magnificent were those Romans in their disregard of everything except direction!” And being a professional novelist I naturally began at once to consider the possibilities of exploiting Watling Street in fiction. Then I climbed to the brow of my own hill, whence, at the foot of the long northerly slope, I could descry the outposts of my village, a mile away; there was no habitation of mankind nearer to me than this picturesque and venerable hamlet, which seemed to lie inconsiderable on the great road like a piece of paper. The seventy-four telegraph wires which border the great road run above the roofs of Winghurst as if they were unaware of its existence. “And Winghurst,” I reflected, “is henceforth my metropolis.” No office! No memorising of time-tables! No daily struggle-for-lunch! Winghurst, with three hundred inhabitants, the centre of excitement, the fount of external life!
The course of these ordinary but inevitable thoughts was interrupted by my consciousness of a presence near me. A man coughed. He had approached me, in almost soleless boots, on the grassy footpath. For a brief second I regarded him with that peculiar fellow-feeling which a man who has risen extremely early is wont to exhibit towards another man who has risen extremely early. But finding no answering vanity in his undistinguished features I quickly put on an appearance of usualness, to indicate that I might be found on that spot at that hour every morning. The man looked shabby, and that Sherlock Holmes who lies concealed in each one of us decided for me that he must be a tailor out-of-work.
“Good morning, sir,” he said.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Do you want to buy a good recipe for a horse, sir?” he asked.
“A horse?” I repeated, wondering whether he was a lunatic, or a genius who had discovered a way to manufacture horses.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “They often fall sick, sir, you know. The saying is, as I daresay you’ve heard, ‘Never trust a woman’s word or a horse’s health.’”
I corrected his quotation.
“I’ve got one or two real good recipes,” he resumed.
“But I’ve got no horse,” I replied, and that seemed to finish the interview.
“No offence, I hope, sir,” he said, and passed on towards the Delectable Mountains.
He was a mystery; his speech disclosed no marked local accent; he had certainly had some education; and he was hawking horse-remedies in Watling Street at sunrise. Here was the germ of my first lesson in rusticity. Except in towns, the “horsey” man does not necessarily look horsey. That particular man resembled a tailor, and by a curious coincidence the man most fearfully and wonderfully learned in equine lore that I have yet known is a tailor.
But horses! Six miles away to the West I could see the steam of expresses on the London and North Western Main line; four miles to the East I could see the steam of expresses on the Midland. And here was an individual offering stable-recipes as simply as though they had been muffins! I reflected on my empty stable, harness-room, coachhouse. I began to suspect that I was in a land where horses entered in the daily and hourly existence of the people. I had known for weeks that I must buy a horse; the nearest town and the nearest railway station were three miles off. But now, with apprehension, I saw that mysterious and dangerous mercantile operation to be dreadfully imminent: me,coram publico, buying a horse, me the dupe of copers, me a butt for the covert sarcasm of a village omniscient about horses and intolerant of ignorance on such a subject!
Down in the village, that early morning, I saw a pony and an evidently precarious trap standing in front of the principal shop. I had read about the “village-shop” in novels; I had even ventured to describe it in fiction of my own; and I was equally surprised and delighted to find that the villageshop of fiction was also the village-shop of fact. It was the mere truth that one could buy everything in this diminutive emporium, that the multifariousness of its odours excelled that of the odours of Cologne, and that the proprietor, who had never seen me before, instantly knew me and all about me. Soon I, was in a fair way to know something of the proprietor. He was informing me that he had five little children, when one of the five, snuffling and in a critical mood, tumbled into the shop out of an obscure Beyond.
“And what’s your name?” I enquired of the girl, with that fatuous, false blandness of tone which the inexpert always adopt toward children. I thought of the five maidens whose names were five sweet symphonies, and moreover I deemed it politic to establish friendly relations with my monopolist.
“She’s a little shy,” I remarked.
“It’s a boy, sir,” said the monopolist.
It occurred to me that Nature was singularly uninventive in devising new quandaries for the foolish.
“Tell the gentleman your name.”’
Thus admonished, the boy emitted one monosyllable: “Guy.”
“We called him Guy because he was horn on the fifth of November,” the monopolist was good enough to explain.
As I left the shop a man driving a pony drew up at the door with an immense and sudden flourish calculated to impress the simple. I noticed that the pony was the same animal which I had previously seen standing there.
“Want to buy a pony, sir?” The question was thrown at me like a missile that narrowly escaped my head; launched in a voice which must once have been extremely powerful, but which now, whether by abuse of shouting in the open air or by the deteriorating effect of gin on the vocal chords, was only a loud, passionate whisper: so that, though the man obviously bawled with all his might, the drum of one’s ear was not shattered. I judged, partly from the cut of his coat and the size of the buttons on it, and partly from the creaminess of the shaggy, long-tailed pony, that my questioner was or had been connected with circuses. His very hand was against him; the turned-back podgy thumb showed acquisitiveness, and the enormous Gophir diamonds in brass rings argued a certain lack of really fine taste. His face had literally the brazen look, and that absolutely hard, impudent, glaring impassivity acquired only by those who earn more than enough to drink by continually bouncing the public.
“The finest pony in the county, sir.” (It was an animal organism gingerly supported on four crooked legs; a quadruped and nothing more.) “The finest pony in the county!” he screamed, “Finest pony in England, sir! Not another like him! I took him to the Rothschild horse-show, but they wouldn’t have him. Said I’d come too late to enter him for the first-clawss. They were afraid—afferaid! There was the water-jump. ‘Stand aside, you blighters,’ I said, ‘and he’ll jump that, the d——d gig and all,’ But they were afferaid!”
I asked if the animal was quiet to drive.
“Quiet to drive, sir, did you say? I shouldsayso. I saysAway, andoffhe goes.” Here the thin scream became a screech. “Then I saysPull up, you blighter, and he stops dead. A child could drive him. He don’t want no driving. You could drive him with a silken thread.” His voice melted, and with an exquisite tender cadence he repeated: “With a silk-en therredd!”
“Well,” I said. “How much?”
“How much, did you say, sir? How much?” He made it appear that this question came upon him as an extraordinary surprise. I nodded.
He meditated on the startling problem, and then yelled: “Thirty guineas. It’s giving him away.”
“Make it shillings,” I said. I was ingenuously satisfied with my retort, but the man somehow failed to appreciate it.
“Come here,” he said, in a tone of intimate confidence. “Come here. Listen. I’ve had that pony’s picture painted. Finest artist in England, sir. And frame! You never see such a frame! At thirty guineas I’ll throw the picture in. Look ye! That picture cost me two quid, and here’s the receipt.” He pulled forth a grimy paper, and I accepted it from his villainous fingers. It proved, however, to be a receipt for four pounds, and for the portrait, not of a pony, but of a man.
“This is a receipt for your own portrait,” I said.
“Now wasn’t that a coorious mistake for me to make?” he asked, as if demanding information. “Wasn’t that a coorious mistake?”
I was obliged to give him the answer he desired, and then he produced the correct receipt.
“Now,” he said wooingly, “There! Is it a trade? I’ll bring you the picture to-night. Finest frame you ever saw! What? No? Look here, buy him at thirty guineas—say pounds—and I’ll chuck you both the blighted pictures in!”
“Away!” he screamed a minute later, and the cream pony, galvanised into frantic activity by that sound, and surely not controllable by a silken thread, scurried off towards the Delectable Mountains.
This was my first insight into horse dealing.
Few forms of amusement are more amusing and few forms of amusement cost less than to walk slowly along the crowded central thoroughfares of a great capital—London, Paris, or Timbuctoo—with ears open to catch fragments of conversation not specially intended for your personal consumption. It, perhaps, resembles slightly the justly blamed habit of listening at keyholes and the universally practised habit of reading other people’s postcards; it is possibly not quite “nice.” But, like both these habits, it is within the law, and the chances of it doing any one any harm are exceedingly remote. Moreover, it has in an amazing degree the excellent quality of taking you out of yourself—and putting you into some one else. Detectives employ it, and if it were forbidden where would novelists be? Where, for example, would Mr. Pett Ridge be? Once yielded to, it grows on you; it takes hold of you in its fell, insidious clutch, as does the habit of whisky, and becomes incurable. You then treat it seriously; you make of it a passkey to the seventy and seven riddles of the universe, with wards for each department of life. You judge national characteristics by it; by it alone you compare rival civilisations. And, incidentally, you somewhat increase your social value as a diner-out.
For a long time I practised it in the streets of Paris, the city of efficient chatter, the city in which wayfarers talk with more exuberance and more grammar than anywhere else. Here are a few phrases, fair samples from lists of hundreds, which I have gathered and stored, on the boulevards and in quieter streets, such as the Rue Blanche, where conversation grows intimate on mild nights:—
She is mad.
She lived on the fourth floor last year.
Yes, she is not bad, after all.
Thou knowest, my old one, that my wife is a little bizarre.
He has left her.
They say she is very jealous.
Anything except oysters.
Thou annoyest me terribly, my dear.
It is a question solely of the cache-corset.
With those feet!
He is a beau garçon, but—
He is the fourth in three years.
My big wolf!
Do not say that, my small rabbit.
She doesn’t look it.
It is open to any one to assert that such phrases have no significance, or that, if they have significance, their significance must necessarily be hidden from the casual observer. But to me they are like the finest lines in the tragedies of John Ford.
Marlow was at his best in the pentameter, but Ford usually got his thrill in a chipped line of about three words—three words which, while they mean nothing, mean everything. All depends on what you “read into” them. And the true impassioned student of human nature will read into the overheard exclamations of the street a whole revealing philosophy. What! Two temperaments are separately born, by the agency of chance or the equally puzzling agency of design, they one day collide, become intimate, and run parallel for a space. You perceive them darkly afar off; they approach you; you are in utter ignorance of them; and then in the instant of passing you receive a blinding flash of illumination, and the next instant they are eternally hidden from you again. That blinding flash of illumination may consist of “My big wolf!” or it may consist of “It is solely a question of the cache-corset.” But in any case it is and must be profoundly significant. In any case it is a gleam of light on a mysterious place. Even the matter of the height of the floor on which she lived is charged with an overwhelming effect for one who loves his fellow-man. And lives there the being stupid or audacious enough to maintain that the French national character does not emerge charmingly and with a curious coherence from the fragments of soul-communication which I have set down?
On New Year’s Eve I was watching the phenomena of the universal scheme of things in Putney High-street. A man and a girl came down the footpath locked in the most intimate conversation. I could see that they were perfectly absorbed in each other. And I heard the man say:—
“Yes, Charlie is a very good judge of beer—Charlie is!”
And then they were out of hearing, vanished from the realm of my senses for ever more. And yet people complain that the suburbs are dull! As for me, when I grasped the fact that Charlie was a good judge of beer I knew for certain that I was back in England, the foundation of whose greatness we all know. I walked on a little farther and overtook two men, silently smoking pipes. The companionship seemed to be a taciturn communion of spirits, such as Carlyle and Tennyson are said to have enjoyed on a certain historic evening. But I was destined to hear strange messages that night. As I forged ahead of them, one murmured:—
“I done him down a fair treat!”
No more! I loitered to steal the other’s answer. But there was no answer. Two intelligences that exist from everlasting to everlasting had momentarily joined the path of my intelligence, and the unique message was that some one had been done down a fair treat. They disappeared into the unknown of Werter-road, and I was left meditating upon the queer coincidence of the word “beer” preceding the word “treat.” A disturbing coincidence, a caprice of hazard! And my mind flew back to a smoking-concert of my later youth, in which “Beer, beer, glorious beer” was followed, on the programme, by Handel’s Largo.
In the early brightness of yesterday morning fate led me to Downing-street, which is assuredly the oddest street in the world (except Bow-street). Everything in Downing-street is significant, save the official residence of the Prime Minister, which, with its three electric bells and its absurdly inadequate area steps, is merely comic. The way in which the vast pile of the Home Office frowns down upon that devoted comic house is symbolic of the empire of the permanent official over the elected of the people. It might be thought that from his second-floor window the Prime Minister would keep a stern eye on the trembling permanent official. But experienced haunters of Downing-street know that the Hessian boot is on the other leg. Why does that dark and grim tunnel run from the side of No. 10, Downing-street, into the spacious trackless freedom of the Horse Guards Parade, if it is not to facilitate the escape of Prime Ministers fleeing from the chicane of conspiracies? And how is it that if you slip out of No. 10 in your slippers of a morning, and toddle across to the foot of the steps leading to St. James’s Park, you have instantly a view (a) of Carlton House Terrace and (b) of the sinister inviting water of St. James’s Park pond? I say that the mute significance of things is unsettling, in the highest degree. That morning a motor-brougham was seeking repose in Downing-street. By the motorbrougham stood a chauffeur, and by the chauffeur stood a girl under a feathered hat. They were exchanging confidences, these two. I strolled nonchalantly past. The girl was saying:—
“Look at this skirt as I’ve got on now. Me and her went ’alves in it. She was to have it one Sunday, and me the other. But do you suppose as I could get it when it come to my turn? Not me! Whenever I called for it she was always—” I heard no more. I could not decently wait. But I was glad the wearer had ultimately got the skirt. The fact was immensely significant.