CHAPTER XV.REPENTANCE.
I found her next morning seated on the Peak, and looking out to sea. She turned at my approach, as I came up the steep path from the market-place.
‘That is where the fighting is to begin, then,’ she said, pointing north and north-east into the infinite blue. ‘We are to go there and look for something to kill—you said so. Father says you did not; I say you did. Oh, why must they always begin these things by killing something? Is there no new way?’
‘Only just a little killing, Victoria; it will soon be over; and only aborigines to kill! I believe they hardly mind it at all. It would make you a people in no time; you have no idea how soon it would change the look of everything here.’
She stood up and turning landwards, casta wistful gaze over the settlement. ‘I suppose itwouldchange things a good deal.’
‘You really would not know the place again.’
‘And yet——’
‘Come, Victoria, look on the bright side, and don’t go back on yourself. Where shall we put your father’s palace? He will want a palace, or a castle, or something of the sort, in time. He cannot always live with Thomas and Richard and the other one, down there. Suppose we put him on the other Point, facing this. Then we will build a little arbour here for you, and rail it off, and you shall have it all to yourself.’
She answered never a word, but soon I wanted no one to answer, for the excitement of laying out this domain for the higher civilisation was enough in itself. ‘We will keep all this northern half of the Island for the governing classes, and put the people on the other. The views are so much prettier on our side. If you could persuade your good folk to give up the settlement altogether, it would make a sweet little park for the castle; and the market-place, below, might easilybe rigged up as a preserve. I should put a factory on the popular section. It would amuse them. The chimney need never show, if you know how to choose your site.’
‘What is a factory?’ asked Victoria.
‘What is a factory? Well, a factory is—a factory. Dear me, fair Islander, you are sometimes too elementary for profitable talk! A factory is a place where a number of people work together to simplify the process of appropriating their earnings to one. You give them a little of it back, for provender, and keep as much as you can for yourself. What you keep back is called capital. They make it all, of course, or some of their forerunners made it, every sou or cent. You get it—that is the main point. Your share is claimed as cost of superintendence, charge for the loan of your brains, or, by-and-by, as interest on your savings—a very superior plea. But it all comes out of labour—all, all,ALL. Labour does not mind, poor thing, if you give it just enough to go on with. According to the best authorities, there must be, at least, one meal a day. The half-meal experiment is discredited: it cutsthings too fine. This is the starting-point—just what will keep people alive. How much more they will insist on having is a matter of bargain between you and them. But only fight hard against their greediness, and it is astonishing how you can keep it down.’
‘But why do you want to keep it down, and take so much for yourself?’
‘For the use of your precious brains, for direction, for vigilance, for keeping your eye on ’em. Think how they would idle, else! There’s a good deal of idling in this settlement. I caught two the other day—supposed to be hoeing potatoes—really pelting each other with wild flowers. It was in the great dip of green turf and shrubbery, just beyond the gorge. And now I think of it, why not put the factory there—on the slope; so that all you will have to do with your refuse is to shoot it out at the back door? It will take years to fill up the hollow, and when it is filled up, there are others just as good, to right and left. That is the way they make the valleys useful in Lancashire; I have seen it done. The people can have theirlittle cottages on the edge; and, as the rubbish hardens, it makes a handy playground for the children, right under the mother’s eye. Keep your eye on ’em all round, from the cradle to the grave—that’s the essence of the system. So, there is your factory, Victoria, and now what are you going to manufacture? Tappa cloth! Turn it out cheap, and run it as a new kind of shoddy? Potatoes! Potato spirit! How did that man make his tipple—the fellow that went mad, and jumped off the steep place? Import machinery, and get the whiskey monopoly of the South Seas? Sugar! Are we quite in the right place for that? Taro! Why, of course:—“Taro, the new Vegetable Food! Testimonial from his Excellency the Governor of Pitcairn.” How do you like that for a poster? Birds, beasts, and fishes—what can you do in that way? Sea birds! If we could get up something for ladies’ hats, your father might be a rich man in ten years.’
‘Oh, bother!’ said she.
‘I need hardly remind you, Victoria, that this is not the language of economical discussion.’
‘Well, I cannot help it; you seem so fond of beginning at the wrong end.’
‘Excuse me, that is just what I was going to say about your people here. It is all the fault of their unhappy geographical situation. Quite upside down, you know. I could show you in an instant, if I had a map.’
‘Yes, I know, but I sometimes wonder whichisthe right side up. All your plans seem to begin by taking something for yourself, everlasting No. 1; “take, take, take,” and so your world goes round. I wonder if it would not go round as well to “give, give, give.” Think of others first; self is sure to get its turn. How would that be, I wonder? I do so wonder sometimes! Do the hardest thing first, and get that right. I do not think things can ever come right, unless you begin by giving up. Don’t you think it is just as disgusting to make as much as you honestly can, as to eat as much as you honestly can? Why do you want to stuff so? That is what I thought you meant yesterday. And you did mean it; you may say what you like. Suppose you are cleverer than the others; well, be thankful you can do something more forthem. That seems the natural way. Are you sure you haven’t got a twist? I only ask. Why should brains be so greedy? All the harm in the world that I ever saw or heard of comes from greediness, gobbling. Give up, give up, give up. Oh, only that makes men different from pasturing brutes! Once I read a natural history book, and the gentleman that wrote it was trying to find out what made a man a man. The two legs wouldn’t do, you know, because there’s the chickens. Then he tried “no tails?”—“no feathers?” Oh, how he did try, taking off this and that, till the thing seemed almost ready to put in the oven. He made me laugh so. I came up here, and thought about it, just like a riddle; and at last I said, “give it up;” and then it came upon me, all of a sudden—why that was the very answer! That is why man is not the same as the pasturing brutes: because he can give up, because he can think of all, and himself as only one of them. He is real man when he is doing that, and real brute when he is doing the other thing. That is what I thought you were going to tell us last night—how much more we could give up. Do show us howthey give up in England; that’s what we want to know.’
‘Victoria, don’t be troublesome. I am planning the estate.’
I turned and looked down upon the Island, north, south, and west, in all its heavenly beauty; ah, what a dish to carve! Blue sea, patches of coral sand, silver cascades gushing from the rocks; glory of trees and flowers, of clear skies, and of rainbow-tinted mists, flecking here and there the background of perfect turquoise; glory of the soft beauty of the grove and settlement, of the wild beauty of the hills, of the ordered beauty of the happy mean in the plantations beyond, all visible, from this height, to the farthest rocks that stood firm for ever against the beat of the waves. The delight of it came up to me through every sense; in its odours, from the groves and gardens, the soft breeze sighing my way; in its sounds, from the tinkle of a tame goat’s bell here and there, or from the faint echoes of the woodman’s axe, following, in due measure of seconds, after the flash of the sunlight on the polished steel. And, for sight again, there was more of the exquisite humanlife in tiny groups dotted all over the fields in leisured toil, or in opalescent green shapes in the water, off the far Point, that I knew to be the bodies of diving girls.
Then, for the inner eye, the scene changed, and I was once more on the steps of the Royal Exchange, with that other sight below me wrestling its way out of the London mist—the Blessed of Dividend day; the dandy clerks making for the turtle; the shabby clerks making for the buns; the parson hurrying away to his preaching, as per bequest of pious founder; the hungry-looking wretches peddling the pocket combs; the flower girls in their foul finery, mal-odorous of gin all this way off, types of that fatallest of all divisions of labour which puts the work in absolute non-relation to the life of the worker; the slouching beggar; the shunting policeman; the demonstrating rabble with the average 7s.6d.to the hundred pockets, divided by a wall only from the bullion wells of the Bank; the nondescript thousands in black, and brown, and russet, and all, all, as explained, from the beggar upwards, tormented with the secret itch of civilisation, all scratching onthe sly, and, with the scratching, throwing themselves everlastingly out of focus for my grand pictorial composition of a happy family of human kind.
And, as the grim pageant faded out again, I was once more back in the Blessed Isle—the Isle that I was laying out afresh for civilisation, to make it like the isle of my birth. I looked again, and hardly a point had changed in my short excursion to the other side of the world. The axe that was poised in the air was now buried in the tree, and the shining body of one of the girls had come to the surface, to catch the sunlight in its stead. Victoria was looking too, but with her head turned from mine; and, as we travelled in opposite directions round the circle of vision, our eyes had to meet at last.
I read in hers what she, I know, must have read in mine: ‘Oh, the pity of it!’
And, with this pang, came a strange question. As that scene was the beginning of the disease that drove me so far afield for ease from torment, is not this scene the beginning of the remedy? For, what may be the meaning of that troubled vision of the Exchangesteps, what but ‘Each for himself,’ and the Devil ever on the track of the hindmost, till there is but one left for first and last? While, of this vision, the ever blessed interpretation is clear and true—‘Each for all’ in love, and truth, and mutual helpfulness, in real brotherhood and sisterhood—the core of the whole mystery, in morals, politics, religion, law and life.