CHAPTER XIV.A PLOT.
No better opportunity could have been desired. His Excellency was very chatty that night, in mere reaction of mood, perhaps, against the prevailing gloom of the Island. We met on the lawn; and he was as full of glowing courtesies, before passing indoors to his supper, as the gracious Duncan on another occasion, while he ran the same risk of deadly intent against the peace that was his very life. I, knowing what was making ready for him, could not but feel like a Thane of Cawdor, while Victoria, I am sorry to say, filled the part of the lady of the castle. She watched me, even more than she watched him, and whenever I showed symptoms of recoil from the dreadful venture, she impelled me by a look.
‘We’re getting better, sir,’ he said cheerilywhen he had finished his meal, ‘but it’s a slow cure. I’m going to fine some of ’em to-morrow for cutting the trees. It’ll wake ’em up, and give ’em something else to think about. Not but what things might have been worse; only three new love-knots, according to my reckoning, four initials with crown and anchor, two hearts with arrows, one ditto without—and I think I’ve been all over the place.’
Now for it.
‘What else can you expect, my friend? They must do something. Things are rather slow here.’
It was the horrid first blow, and it quite staggered the poor old man.
‘As how?’ he faintly said.
I could have stopped for pity, but Victoria smiled at me from behind his chair. Then, I shut my eyes and struck on.
‘Rather humdrum, you know. No spirit, no careers; one man as good as another, and not even a good deal better, as the saying goes.’
‘It never troubled me,’ he meekly said.
‘Yet you are the Chief Magistrate!’
‘Well, if we are in fault, sir, I shall be glad to hear of it. What’s amiss?’
‘Not very much, perhaps; only I think you want variety of formation, that’s all.’
‘We shall get it right, sir, I dare say, if it is to be got right. Please go on. You have travelled; you are able to speak.’
‘Well, by variety of formation I mean the division of classes. Look at the beautiful gradation at home—an aristocracy for the fine art of life; a middle class for the moral qualities, which are not fine art, but only helps to it; a lower for the mere drudgery outside of both art and morals. The great mark of all progressive nations is that struggle of each man to make some other do his dirty work for him, which is commonly known as aspiration for the higher life. A few live in dignity, unhaste, affluence, and wear the fine flower of manners; but, to sustain the costly show, and help them so to live, the many give up all hope of these things on their own account, sometimes forming perfect castes, who do the dirty work from father to son, as others fill the office of Earl Marshal.’
‘I do assure you, sir, we’ve nothing of that sort here.’
‘This self-denying section has many names. Sometimes it is called the slave class; but “working,” or “lower” class, or “sons of toil,” is usually preferred, as being the politer and less descriptive term. They engage in all the mal-odorous tasks, to the end that the others may smell sweet, and accumulate porcelain, where the conception of beautiful living is in that somewhat rudimentary stage. Now you are in a curious, not to say an unexampled, position. You are without this indispensable class; and how you have got on, even so far, without it is a mystery to me. Being without it, you are, of course, without the other two. Your middle term of the great combination is nowhere; and, for your aristocracy, where is it to be found? You may have your own way of bettering yourselves, but what it is I fail to see.’
‘Of bettering ourselves by making others worse?’
‘Well—if you choose to put it in that way. Inequality is our religion, as a great man has so finely said. Our humblest grocerlikes, in his way, to have an eldest son, and even sometimes, in modest imitation of his superiors, a youngest daughter.’
‘We can’t alter it,’ he said, fumbling in his pocket; ‘it ain’t allowed under the rules.’
‘A new law?’ I suggested—‘a sort of constitutional amendment?’
‘They wouldn’t stand it; that’s my humble belief.’
‘They might be made to stand it,’ I said darkly.
‘Who’s to make ’em?’ asked the Chief Magistrate.
‘Hum!’
But his Excellency said nothing to help me out.
‘You’ve no one you could rely upon, I suppose, if you thought it necessary to save society—no band of patriots devoted to your person—no arms?’
‘There’s the public hammer; that’s all I know of.’
‘Well, well; turn it over in your mind. See what we have done at home. A few centuries ago we were no better off than you;every man with his bit of land for tillage, his common for grazing, a rather demoralising plenty in every hut—no really efficient slave class, in fact. But a patriotic nobility soon put a stop to that, enclosed the commons, broke up the small farms, and made a proletariat that is, to this day, the wonder and envy of the world. Then began industrial and imperial England. The old state was England for the English; but really they did not know what to do with it; the new one is, England for her betters—and see where we are now.’
‘Ah! it is wonderful how you manage things over there; it’s like a piece of watchmaking. But, bless you, our fingers are too clumsy.’
‘You have to master the principle of the movement—that is all. Teach a whole community to unite riches with righteousness as the object of its hunger and thirst; and the thirst, especially, will beget a tremulous cerebral excitement which will keep it always on the go. Do not carry this to excess, for it will never do to have your social movement confounded with the drinker’s “jumps.” Only rememberthat, as we argue, no wealth—no luxury; no luxury—no crumbs for Lazarus.’
‘Oh, dear!’ said Victoria.
‘Oh, deary, deary me!’ said the Ancient, wiping his brow.
‘You yourself might set an example in this matter. Such things often grow from very small beginnings. The Island diet, I perceive, is chiefly fish and vegetables. Now, in your position as Governor, you should eat meat at least three times a week. It would mark a difference; and, by-and-by, you might manage to get the more toothsome things, such as the sweetbreads and the guavas, reserved for your own table. The great principle is, not—as, I fear, you imagine—that one man’s best of service ought to count like another man’s best, in respect of his right to the needful things of life, but that, on the contrary, each bit of human helpfulness should be weighed in a balance, and more pudding given to those whose morsel weighs most. The nice adjustment of the quantity of the pudding to the nature of the service is our economic and, indeed, our moral ideal. We have long since given the requisite superfluityto our governors and other men of action; now the cry is, “More pudding to the seers;” and it is one of the most exhilarating cries of the day, in its evidence of our progress in true spirituality. A great preacher, a great penman, a great revealer of the beautiful in plastic art, soon has his plate heaped up.’
‘But won’t the others get less?’ said Victoria, now beginning, I thought, to repent of her part in the plot.
‘O yes; but the others are stupid.’
‘They are brothers.’
‘Only by courtesy, I think you will find. “Brothers in Christ Jesus,” I believe, is the exact term.’
‘They get hungry three times a day, all the same,’ said the girl, flashing revolt.
‘I am afraid you will begin to think I want to civilise you against your will,’ I returned, after a pause.—The rising was quelled.
‘Then, excuse the remark, my friend, but your Church puzzles me a little. I see no hierarchy, to use the proper expression; no grade upon grade, each, as aforesaid, enjoying more pudding than the one below, until, withthe highest, we reach a tableland covered with acres of this delicacy. To tell the honest truth about it, the Church began in a very small way, and it will not do to ignore the fact that the old stable has become a prosperous house of business, with a frontage in the best thoroughfares. Some of the Apostles, respectable as they undoubtedly were, must have smelt strongly of fish—though modern research has, I believe, discovered that they were not mere hands before the mast, but owners of smacks. Their successors—this Bishop from York or Canterbury, this Cardinal Prince from Rome—never offend in that way. Their lives testify to their faith in a manner that must carry conviction to the most sceptical minds. They do not merely say that religion is a good thing, and an all-sufficient, for this world and the next; they show it forth. Step into their houses—hangings and raiment of price, cabinets of medals, rarest parchments, bindings, curios, gems of painting, six courses and dessert every day but fast-day, and kickshaws innumerable to make a mere gastronomic symbol even of that. Their very pastoral staves are wroughtin fine gold; and, to preclude all possibility of their employment in coarser uses, are so adroitly filled in with ornament that, by no exercise of human ingenuity, could they be made to hook so much as a leg of lamb. Thus has a religion of humility been saved from its earlier accidental association with low life, and become a calling fit for a gentleman, until the middle, and even the upper, classes have not disdained it, nor professional investors of talent considered it unworthy of their regard. All its original difficulties as a creed of morbid self-denial have been cleared away by the beautiful modern development of the symbol. Is it awkward to watch and work for the needy, day and night? Well, wash their feet at Easter, and you may wash your hands of them for the rest of the year. In my travels have I seen an Emperor and an Archbishop condescending to this exercise, one quite busy with the scented water, the other at hand with theservietteof fine linen edged with lace. ’Tis a peppercorn rent of service and of compassionate deeds; and for this, what generous holdings in the good things of life, in park, moorland, and forest, in palaces of splendourthat open to no wayfarer without an introduction, yet are often symbolled for boundless hospitality by some pretty device! The symbol! the symbol! precious contrivance for effecting a truemodus vivendibetween the tastes of a gentleman and the duties of a creed. With this to aid, my friend, your Church will be the fitting mainstay of your social arrangements, being indeed truly of them, bone of bone, flesh of flesh, its meanest curate fired with the laudable ambition of getting on in the world, and, to this end, not regardless of snug spinsters with the talent laid by in the napkin of the Three per Cents. But where areyouin all this? I ask, Where is even your beginning of better things? What note have you of a living Church, when you have not so much as a great doctrinal contest to settle the metaphysical reasons for goodness, before you begin to be good?’
‘That’s what I was just thinking,’ said the Ancient; ‘whereabouts are we?’
‘Parties are the life of the Church: is there no way of starting a question? Do you do anything in pew rents?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s my place a littlenearer the schoolmaster than the others, but that’s only because I’m rather deaf.’
‘Vestments? You could not put your pastor in bands? The great thing is to mark him off from the rest, and to give him his badge, as a being engaged in special communication with the Unseen. He is not to be like yourselves, a simple work-a-day creature, feeling his way to the law by the perpetual revelations of the conscience and the heart, and only getting a little beyond you in the knowledge of it, because he feels and labours more. No, he is to be a creature apart, interpreting a message from behind the Veil—a message delivered, not merely a meaning found. This solemn function must have its uniform; so we think; and, for some time, a quarrel over the cut of the uniform was one of the most stimulating exercises of our faith.’
‘Quarrels are fines with us,’ said his Excellency, ‘but we might strike that out.’
‘I do not see what father is to do in all this,’ said Victoria.
‘Then I am afraid I have failed to make my meaning clear. He might do everything; he might become the father of his country bysowing the seeds of a governing caste. Your worst danger, at present, is the want of all distinction in externals between governors and governed. I have already suggested a slight improvement in the matter of domestic style. There are others. Your father dwells in the same sort of hut as his people—why not raise the roof of the hut? Six inches would do it. He is altogether too easy of approach. Is there no one who could act as chamberlain, usher, or go-between?’
‘Reuben hasn’t got much to do of evenings,’ said the Ancient, in a musing tone that seemed to betoken no displeasure.
‘That’s it; live like yourself, and take your place; guide your people; rouse them out of this sloth of comfort and happiness; give them national ideals, great ambitions, great struggles.’
He shook his head. ‘I really don’t think you could get up a fight about anything here.’
‘I don’t mean that exactly; but why not have a foreign policy, and then it would all come in the way of nature? Have you no neighbours?’
‘None.’
‘There’s that Island Reuben found out, father,’ said Victoria.
‘Why not place it under your protectorate?’
‘There’s nothing to protect, only some dead coral and a cave full of bones. Besides, it’s a hundred and fifty miles away.’
‘Oh, my good friend, your motto should be “distance no object,” if you want to get on. But is there nothing nearer?’
‘Well, there is another—only eighty miles off; but that’s worse—dead coral without the bones.’
‘You are certainly unfortunate. But I should protect these places, all the same, and leave a garrison. Never tell me! if you push on far enough, you must come to something to fight at last. Providence can hardly have meant you to be shut up in this place without an enemy in the world. Only take care, when you do come within touch of your fellow creatures, to have a weapon in your hand.’
The girl shuddered.—‘More killing!’
‘You’ve got to find your excuse for hitting ’em, even then,’ he said.
‘Oh, insist on protecting them, and that will do.’
‘But how are you to find an excuse for that?’
‘Why you seize one place to-day, to make good your hold on another that you seized yesterday; and to-morrow you seize one place more, for the same reason. It is a process known as “inevitable expansion”; and if only you follow it out logically, it leads you all round the world.’
‘But where’s the good?’
‘It employs your young men and your bolder spirits; it doubles the wealth and the luxury of your capitalists; it leaves even a few more crusts from their table for your poor; and it provides a receptacle for your overflow of destitution when the crusts give out. In earlier days, when this system of main drainage on the colonial system was almost unknown, Nature had periodically to step in with a Black Death or a Plague to clear the heaps of human refuse away.’
‘It seems rather a roundabout way, after all. Why not try to make ’em happy at home?’
‘Well, my friend, you cannot argue about these things, you must feel them. Civilisation is an acquired taste. Take your time, and let me know how you like the flavour, to-morrow night.’
Neither returned my parting salutation. The Ancient was lost in thought, and did not hear it: Victoria had stolen out to gossip with the stars.