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Title: The island
or, an adventure of a person of quality
Author: Richard Whiteing
Release date: May 13, 2024 [eBook #73620]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1888
Credits: Joeri de Ruiter, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ISLAND ***
THE ISLAND
OR
AN ADVENTURE OF A PERSON OF QUALITY
BY
RICHARD WHITEING
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET
1888
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. OUT OF FOCUS 1
II. FURTHER AFIELD 9
III. FLIGHT 28
IV. ADVENTURE 32
V. RESCUE 41
VI. BEARINGS 53
VII. SETTLING DOWN 58
VIII. GOVERNMENT, ARTS, AND LAWS 67
IX. NURSE 74
X. SUNDAY 86
XI. A SAIL 98
XII. THREE DAYS 108
XIII. A MISSION 120
XIV. A PLOT 127
XV. REPENTANCE 143
XVI. A DECLARATION 154
XVII. A MEDITATION 161
XVIII. A LORD OF INDIA 173
XIX. PEDIGREE OF A POOR STUPID 188
XX. A VILLAGE FESTIVAL 213
XXI. A ROMAN HOLIDAY 228
XXII. MISUNDERSTANDING 237
XXIII. ANOTHER SAIL 244
XXIV. A PARAGRAPH 263
XXV. ANOTHER PARTING 269
XXVI. AN EXPLANATION 278
XXVII. THE PROMISE OF THE SKIES 289
THE ISLAND.
CHAPTER I.
OUT OF FOCUS.
Lat. 25° 4′ S.; long. 130° 8′ W.: August 18.
Rest, peace, the sounds of a summer noon, and the murmur of waves.
The calm of a peak in the Pacific thirteen thousand miles away from
the dome of St. Paul’s, and completely out of sight of it, if only by
reason of the curvature.
I hardly know how I came here. When last I took stock of myself, I
was standing on the steps of the Royal Exchange, on another summer
afternoon, and looking down. I was busy as usual. I am playing with my
little pocket agenda now (perhaps the last I shall ever buy) as I lie
here on the broad of my back, and I turn to the entry for that day:
‘8, Gallop, Row; 9.30, letters, coffee; 10.30, article for “Quarterly”;
12.30, City (I wanted Staples to put something on Turks, and thought
I had better be on the spot); 1.30, lunch; 2.30 to bedtime, horse
sale, chrysanthemums, calls, club, early dinner, address Working Men’s
Constitutional Association--“Social Harmonies,” dance at Mrs. G.’s,
club again, Daudet, bed.’
A mosaic like this is all very well, but a trifle throws it out. When I
had done with Staples, I had no further business at the Royal Exchange.
I had certainly nothing to do on the steps; yet I lingered there. It
was only for ten minutes, but it spoiled my day, and perhaps changed my
destiny.
It was such a sight--civilisation in a nutshell--that was what made
me pause. I was a part of it, and Apollo was taking a peep at his own
legs. Why not? we all seemed to be going on so beautifully; we were all
busy, all doing something for progress. What a scene! The Exchange I
had just left, with its groups of millionaires gossiping Bagdad and the
Irawaddy, Chicago and the Cape; dividend day over at the Bank yonder,
and the well known sight of the Blessed going to take their quarterly
reward; a sheriff’s coach turning the angle of the Mansion House
(breakfast to an African pro-consul, I believe), a vanishing splendour
of satin and plush and gold; dandy clerks making for Birch’s, with the
sure and certain hope of a partnership in their easy grace; shabby
clerks making for the bun shops; spry brokers going to take the odds
against Egyptians, and with an appropriate horsiness of air; a parson
(two hundred and fortieth annual thanksgiving sermon at St. Hilda’s to
commemorate Testator’s encounter with Barbary pirates, and providential
escape); itinerant salesmen of studs, pocket combs, and universal watch
keys; flower girls at the foot of the statue, a patch of colour; beggar
at the foot of the steps, another patch, the red shirt beautifully
toned down in wear--Perfect! We want more of this in London--giant
policeman moving him on; irruption of noisy crowd from the Cornhill
corner (East-End marching West to demonstrate for the right to a day’s
toil for a day’s crust); thieves, and bludgeon men, and stone men in
attendance on demonstration; detectives in attendance on thieves;
shutters up at the jewellers’ as they pass; probable average of 7_s._
6_d._ to the hundred pockets; with a wall only to divide them from all
the turtle of the Mansion House, or all the bullion of the Bank! And,
for background, the nondescript thousands in black and brown and russet
and every neutral hue, with the sun over all, and between the sun and
the thousands the London mist.
It was something as a picture, but so much more as a thought. What a
wonder of parts and whole! What a bit of machinery! The beggars, and
occasionally the stock jobbers and the nondescripts to go wrong; the
policeman to take them up; the parson to show the way of repentance;
and the sheriff to hang them, if need be, when all was done. With this,
the dandies to adorn the scene--myself not altogether unornamental--the
merchants, the clerks, and the dividend takers, all but cog and fly and
crank of the same general scheme. What a bit of machinery!
But suddenly the sunlight faded, and there was a change in me. It was
not a change of cause and effect, but only a coincidence. I fancied I
saw the man in red furtively writhing in his shirt with the beggar’s
itch, scratching himself, so to speak, against his own clothes. At
any rate, something threw the apparatus out of gear. They seemed all
scratching themselves on the sly. The whole thing looked as well as
ever; but how did it work? I saw the clerks home, the shabbies to
Stockton lodgings of unstained brick, where infants down with the
measles called for drink in the night, and querulous wives compounded
that claim for romance with which every woman born of woman comes into
the world for the not too solid certainty of bread and butter, at
thirty shillings a week all told. I saw the brokers making for their
haven of Bayswater stucco to receive the reports of Jane’s progress in
Elementary Physics, Master Harry’s broken window, the afternoon call
of the Bristow family to bring news that of late Mr. Bristow has not
been feeling quite so well--receiving these things, I say, and wanting
to stamp and shout, or do something to give a pulse to life. I saw the
sheriff’s coach, methought, with Care in it. There had been another
troublesome meeting in Hyde Park; London was going to be governed
for Londoners; and to-night’s snug Company Dinner, with its guzzling
treasurers, masters, wardens, upper wardens, renter-wardens, past
masters, chaplains, and the whole batch might be one of the last of the
disgusting series. The very policeman had his anxieties; would civic
reform bring him down to the wage level of the Metropolitan force? A
soldier who had strayed into the prospect seemed to think it was odd to
have to guard the Bank on sevenpence a day. They were all scratching
themselves; and when an entire civilisation begins to do that, it is a
serious thing.
It was a serious thing for me. For the life of me I could not get them
into focus again for my grand pictorial composition of a community
all playing the game of life for mutual diversion. Theirs was rather
that infernal game of bowls in the Fourth Circle, where the tormented
wretches will roll the balls in one another’s faces, when a more
sensible direction would give them delightful sport. I drove home,
telegraphed an excuse to the Constitutional Association, and, I am
ashamed to say, went to bed.
I was no better next morning. Human society was still out of focus. I
describe the complaint with some minuteness, because I believe it is
quite a new case for the books, and I may go down to posterity, with
my name tacked to this disease, like a second Bright. The anguish is
insufferable: it is a sort of intense vertigo, with a very disagreeable
accompaniment of sickness in the region of the heart, that robs life of
all joy. The men and women about you, instead of having any relation
to one another of love, friendship, trust, sympathy, and use, become a
mass of gyrating atoms, with nothing but repulsions for their principle
of movement. At times you do not know your own brother for such. They
form no whole; they will not compose; say, rather, they are out of
focus, I come back to that. How to get them in?
I consulted a friend of a most practical order of mind, and, while
frankly confessing his ignorance of the complaint, he thought, from
my persistent mention of the word focus, that distance might be the
remedy. ‘You were too near,’ he said, ‘get further off. Go down to
Richmond, and dine.’ I thought there might be something in that, and I
took his advice. Still it would not come right. So I started for Paris
by the night mail.
CHAPTER II.
FURTHER AFIELD.
London was now quite out of the question: Paris compelled me to be so
busy with itself. I had not seen it for years, and had never gone below
the surface. The tomb of Napoleon, and the view from the Arch (see
Guide) were about the measure of my experience. This time I found a
guide of another kind, and he gave me a glimpse of the real show.
He put me down at the Flute, a delightful club, where they try to amuse
themselves all the year round. When they are not fiddling, at select
evening concerts, they are showing their pictures; and when they are
not showing their pictures, they are holding an assault-at-arms--the
Flute is a great school of fence--or reviewing the year in a fancy
piece, written, mounted, and played by their own men, in their own
theatre. My Mentor gave me a month--as he facetiously put it--at
another club, the choicest thing there. Through an acquaintance at the
Jockey, I found a box-seat on a coach for the private race meeting at
La Marche--very pretty, very select; no coming in your thousands, as
at the Grand Prix, but just a snug thing between you and me, and a few
others, of entirely the right sort. The women looked sweet and fresh as
a bed of primroses; the course was like a tennis lawn; we lunched _al
fresco_, and no one threw bones on the grass. Far, far away the yell of
the bookmaker, and the smell of town. I never enjoyed anything more.
I was presented all round, and was engaged for a reception that night,
at the house of one of the chaperones.
‘You will see the best salon in Paris,’ said A.
‘And what is a salon?’
‘Well, I don’t know; they say nobody knows but themselves. Perhaps a
crowd of clever people trying to kill the worm of ennui. Nothing like
that at home, where the beast is as sacred as the cow at Benares.’
It was _grand monde_ tinctured with literature--that was the social
blend. We went to a delightfully old-fashioned house, one of the few
left, and saluted a delightfully old-fashioned person--a Marquise, I
believe, to complete the harmony of association--who looked like an
original of some Moreau le Jeune. Her hair was silver--perfect Louis
XV., without the powder puff; she had quick piercing eyes, black amid
all this whiteness, and there was a suspicion of hoop in her skirts.
She was the queen of a little court, and very condescending. The
courtiers acted up to their part by elegant flatteries. They told
little stories _at_ her to exemplify her wit and spirit, and capped
quotations from her last book, in stage asides. The book was just out,
and we had learned it by heart that morning, as the inevitable topic
of the small hours. It was a dainty _article de Paris_; all her ripe
experiences of life distilled in maxim, after the manner of M. de la
Rochefoucauld. Every other maxim was about love; they are sometimes
too young, but never too old for that vital theme. There was a certain
disinterested grandeur in the attitude of the Marquise. ‘I too have
played the grand game,’ she seemed to say, ‘and now I umpire the
match.’
‘“One of the consolations of old age for a woman,” said a quoting
courtier to his neighbours, “is to dare follow her inclinations without
peril of love, and show herself a devoted friend, without encouraging
dangerous hopes.” Is it possible to speak with more _finesse_?’
‘I overheard you,’ said the Marquise gaily, ‘but you weaken the
compliment by talking so loud. I am not old enough to be deaf.’
‘For my part,’ said the other, ‘I want to know how the Marquise found
you all out so well, _vous autres_. Listen to this: “Habit has as much
power over the nature of men as the unknown over the mind of women.”
That is my pearl from the chaplet. It is so true.’
‘And so finely said!’
‘Ah, all you care about is the workmanship,’ said our hostess. ‘But I
tell you, I have lived all that.’
A General came by, with a charming woman on his arm. He was, in some
sort, a counterpart of the elderly muse--silvery hair, a raven brow,
and sparkling eyes.
‘The butcher of the Commune,’ whispered A. to me. ‘His column made the
fewest prisoners.’
‘They are beginning to be troublesome again, General,’ I heard the lady
say. ‘That dreadful meeting yesterday! Did you see the account?’
‘We are ready for them, Madame; and with the old argument, mitraille; I
assure you they only pretend to like it: it hurts.’
There was a story about everybody--not always a good one; but their
worst stories were told in their best way. With us, there is so much
ingenuity of subterfuge in the other direction. We might do as well, if
we dared. They dare, because the women insist on it, and the sovereign
obligation is to keep the women amused--the best women, and best is
brightest here. It is a great assault of arms for the gallery, and, if
you have a good place, it is pleasanter to be in the gallery than in
the ring. The exertion is terrible; some of the most noted performers,
I believe, lie abed all next day. You have to justify by gifts, as well
as by graces; and the gifts are not always there. Beautiful statues
are left on their pedestals: the word tells.
Still, I don’t think they make the best of their women. There is,
perhaps, a finer use. They try to make the most of them, certainly. The
women shape the whole civilisation, and they are just now labouring
with much energy at the decline and fall. I have always wondered why
they do not include a representation of this commanding interest in the
government--_Le Ministère de la Femme_. It would soon rule the whole
cabinet, for the incumbent would be sure to know the business of most
of the other departments--War, Commerce, Interior, Foreign Affairs.
It is too good for every day--life on the top of a twelfth cake, and
some of the figures no more to be visited by sun and rain and the winds
of Heaven than if they were cast in sugar. I heard one of them taking
the law from another, on the authority of a gazette of fashion, as to
the right way of getting up on a winter’s morning. There are two ways,
it seems. ‘An hour before you turn out, _ma chère_, the maid is to
light your fire, and put up the screen. Silver lined with pink silk
is pretty; it throws a sort of rosy morning light into the room. Mind
you have your chocolate on a warmer! And do you know how to warm your
toast-rack? A little live charcoal sprinkled with vanilla; it makes the
air so sweet. Raoul gave me such a love of a toast-rack (_un amour_)
the other day. They are making them in gold now. Don’t jump up at once,
mind--snooze. What do you wear for a _déshabillé_? I like satin lined
with swansdown, and velvet fastenings; buttons are so horribly cold.
Line your slippers with swansdown, too; I hate a cold slipper. B-r-r-r!
Madame d’Argenson warms her bath-room with little gusts of rose vapour,
pumped through a hole in the wall; it is an idea. Do you know how to
get warm? Never get cold. Floss silk for your stockings, if you please.
I won’t even _see_ cold. I have my blinds embroidered with a rising
sun, and the maid brings in fresh flowers with the chocolate. It makes
summer in the room. _Excusez du peu._ Then, if you want to know how
happy you are, just lift the blind, and peep out, and see the people
dancing on the pavement to keep themselves warm. But you’ll see enough
of that when you drive, if you like to look at such things. I don’t.
They are making little things in enamel, for muff warmers, now; tiny
apples filled with hot water--not big ones, or you’ll spoil the shape
of your hands. Besides, big ones would make your fingers red; you only
want to make them rosy, _pas trop n’en faut_.
‘What kind of gloves do you sleep in? I prefer a plush lining to the
kid. Some say swansdown. I think it’s _too_ warm. Remember there is
the coverlet. Stick to plush, you can’t do better, from head to foot.
I have seen the nightcap fastened with a little cosy turtle-dove, just
under the left ear--if you lie on that side. And make her bring you a
light _crême de Sabaillon_ when you turn in. You know, two fresh eggs,
and a small glass of Madeira. B-r-r-r! how I hate the cold.’
A padded person of the sterner sex, who was one of the council,
propounded a still more original scheme. ‘_Chère Comtesse_, why all
these precautions, when you might so easily get out of the way? I
travel in search of perpetual summer, and find it. My man begins to
move south, as soon as the cold threatens here, and the moment he
finds settled sunshine, he telegraphs me to come on. I never go till
Nature is ready, and, when I reach one place, he starts for another, so
I always have sunshine in reserve. We keep steadily flying south till
the turn of the weather, and then we make north again for the Paris
May. I was only caught twice by rain last year, and once by sleet,
and then I threatened to discharge him if it happened again. _Chère
Comtesse_, life is too precious: do not waste it in these trials. Will
you have a cup of tea?’
‘He is very wretched, for all his make-believe,’ said Mentor, ‘he is
going to marry; and he is in a torment of prospective jealousy. It
is the funniest case in the world. The young person is faultless;
all our young persons are, you know. He pays the proper visits,
always in evening-dress--it is our way--and talks to her about the
picture-gallery of the Louvre, and the Advent sermons, for just
three-quarters of an hour by the clock, with her mother on guard all
the time. This is courtship. When she marries, she will acquire the
privilege of watching others in the same way, and of being herself
unwatched; and there the retribution comes in. He is not in the least
jealous now; he only knows he is going to be. There are complications,
you see. He is not only about to marry the young person, he is very
fond of her, which is perhaps inexcusable at his time of life. In the
days of his age he remembers his youth, and--_il n’a pas confiance_.
He is meditating some domestic ukase about visitors, and positively
wants to include his mother-in-law in the family circle. “The duenna,
or the cheap defence of households,” is, I believe, the idea. All this,
of course, implies no suspicion of the lady, but only a most horrible
retrospective suspicion of himself. “Do to others as you would not
be done by,” has been the rule of his joyous life; and--_il n’a pas
confiance_. We used to call him “Proverbs.” His choicest conversational
effect was a detestable little saying about the folly of acquiring
the material of happiness for yourself, when you might always command
the stores of your friends. He never quotes his proverb now. I would
rewrite the story of Don Juan from his case, with this torment for
the Nemesis. Let Juan marry and settle on this prospect of eternal
anguish, and leave old raw-head the Commandant, and his horse, for the
nursery tales.’
To a lazy man like myself there is but one drawback in this city; you
are rather expected to make love to your neighbour’s wife. The nuisance
is even greater than in London. They are not exactly rude to you, if
you don’t, but they mark their sense of your behaviour in a thousand
delicate ways. It is considered disrespectful to the lady of the house.
We went to the Opera, and, of course, he led me behind the scenes. It
is certainly magnificent. The most self-indulgent monarchs have never
enjoyed half so much luxury as these essentially combining people get
on the joint-stock principle. They are true democrats, and, as their
institutions develop, the poorest will have his _parc aux cerfs_. There
is no selfishness in the _foyer de la danse_; all the subscribers are
brothers, all equal, all free, as in a temple of faith. _Ces dames_
make no distinctions of persons. It was touching to see Army, Navy,
Commerce, Senate, and Bar--Bench, I believe, as well--paying homage
at these gauze-curtained shrines. Radical and Conservative leaders,
wealthy Jews, the epigrammatic General I had just met, sparks from
the club, and some hideous heads of age that ought to have been under
nightcaps, were all at their devotions, visiting one shrine after
another, sometimes with offerings. _Mesdames_ were occasionally
wayward and severe, but I am loath to believe that they are cruel
divinities, and I am confirmed in this by those who know them best. It
was a brilliant scene, the green room itself a blaze of decoration,
in ceiling, chandeliers and walls; portraits of great dancers and
composers on the panels; grand pictorial compositions above, the War
dance, the Country dance, the Love dance, the Bacchic dance; below, a
curious patchwork of black coat and white skirt, with here and there
a sylph pirouetting for practice, on a floor that slopes like the
stage--a fleece cloud driven by the wind--or holding on for support
to an iron bar cased with velvet, and pointing, with satin-shod toe,
to another and a brighter world. Here, as I have said, Valour reposes
after the toils of war, and Legislation after the fatigues of debate.
Art sketching in the corner is represented by that solitary, who has a
passion for problems, and who is haunted by the desire to transfer this
poetry of motion to canvas, and to make the work tremble with life as
you gaze. Great soul and genius, the only single-minded one in all this
throng--hail!
We looked in at another club on the way home, a mere _tripot_ this,
but gorgeous like all the rest, and throwing blazing beams across the
boulevard from its many chandeliers. Here their industry is _baccarat_,
and the net profits of many a mine and factory, transmitted by
inheritance to youths of spirit who want to see the world, pass from
hand to hand across the baize. Sailors reef the topsail in storms, coal
miners lie on backs or bellies in the dark, girls ripen to premature
womanhood in the tropic heat of factories, to feed this sport. I lost a
few coins, supped, and came away. One of the players was pointed out to
me as the inventor of a new diversion, the Snail Race. The race-course
is a smooth board, with a lighted candle at the end, laid on the table
in a darkened room. The snails naturally creep towards the light.
There are miniature hurdles, and a water-jump, and the handicapping is
done with pellets of clay. You may lose quite enough at this to make it
exciting, by maintaining a due disproportion between the amount of the
wager and the value of the snail. It is played between five and six,
just before dressing for dinner, and it fills in an hour that many find
heavy on their hands.
Next day it was a drive in the Bois to salute one’s friends. I had
already quite a list of them. Surely this people have the secret, I
thought, as we span along through alleys of tender green, with sunlight
dancing in the leaves, blue and white in the bordering villas, and the
purple slopes of Valérien to close in the scene. We skipped the Lake,
according to directions, and looked out for faces under the acacia
trees. They were all there. I was so delighted with it that I could not
go indoors; so we pushed on, by the Cours la Reine, and the river, to
see more.
They have the philosophic taste for angling; the banks were lined, yet
the waters lost nothing by their sport. It was live and let live, with
man and fish. We had left the black coats behind us; they were blouses
now; and everywhere the white and blue and green, the brightness, and
the leisured groups. A worthy pair of retired _rentiers_, male and
female, seemed to have devoted the whole afternoon to washing their
poodle in the Seine. Monsieur lathered him, and drove him into the
water for the rinsing with innocent oaths and ejaculations, ‘_cré
nom!_ _bigre!_ _saperlipopette!_’ or whistled him back with a properly
certificated dog-call, when he seemed to be going out of his depth.
Madame stood by with towel, comb, and brush. For this they had kept
the little grocer’s shop at the corner of the Rue St. Jacques de la
Boucherie for seven-and-twenty years, and toiled late and early,
Sabbath and fête, and put savings in the Paris Loans! ‘And why not?’ I
ask, with ever increasing emphasis, while anyone shall say, ‘And why?’
All classes seem so happy, I thought, so innocently gay--it is the
stock reflection of the tourist in the Paris streets.
I was standing on the bridge; and just then there was a rush past me
of the _avant-garde_ of a crowd, followed by the main body. They
were fierce-looking and sorrowful. Those who were not in blouses wore
grease-polished coats and hats--always a bad sign--and the few who were
not frowning had the grease in their smile, always a worse. There was
a woman at the head of them, in black, and carrying a black flag, an
angular creature, as lantern-jawed as a saint from a missal, with eyes
like live coals.
‘What is it? Who is it?’
‘The Red Virgin. We want bread, _citoyen_.’
It was not literally true, I think--most of them looked fat
enough--prospectively true, perhaps. They hurried off towards the outer
boulevards, I following, and, on their way, they pillaged a baker’s
shop, the Black or Red one standing by, and waving her corpse-flag with
approval, but touching no morsel of the food. Then they poured into
a dirty little hall, garnished in the vestibule with a collection of
pamphlets inciting to murder and arson, and began to ‘meet.’
They had a clear issue before them, and they knew their own minds.
They were met to see how they could burn down civilisation. Nothing
more, nothing less. Government was to go, property, laws, classes, the
whole framework, with all the pretty things I had lately seen--the drag
that took me to La Marche, the salons, the Opera, the coaches in the
Wood, myself too, I suppose, by implication, though none took notice of
me. They spoke with beautiful volubility, precision, logic, each man
perfect in the spouter’s gift.
Presently the Virgin in black rose, and I began to understand why she
was called the Red. She spoke in sing-song the chaunted dirge of the
thing they wanted to burn. It was very grotesque, and very serious.
‘Citizens, it must all go, only the fire can purge it. Nothing will
better it; it has been bettering for eighteen centuries, and it is
worse to-day. I believed once, like them, and wrote hymns to the
other Virgin, and I know she never hears. She is made of stone, like
their hearts. O citizens, the infamy of it!--their fine houses and
fine feasts, fine adulteries and fine lies, with labour for their
everlasting bond-slave and thrall. _Voyons!_ it is all a mockery. How
many of you, before we broke the bread shop open, had eaten to-day?’
‘_Moi!_’ shouted perhaps twenty voices, and about as many hands were
held up, while about five times as many were held down. ‘If there
were only one,’ said the Red Virgin, ‘we would burn it for that one.
What! with ships in every port, and the finest climate and soil in the
universe, and all the labour and all the martyrdom of the past behind
us to start us fair, we cannot give every man his crust and his cup
of wine! _Voyons: on se moque de nous!_ Stand out of the way, with
your governments and your religions, and leave us to ourselves, to be
good. We should be so good without you. It would be so easy; love comes
naturally to man, and justice; only the _laws_ of loving and the _laws_
of justice bar the way. The codes are between us and the Sun. Burn
them, and start afresh. _Vive l’Anarchie!_’
‘_Vive l’Anarchie!_’ cried most of us, but it was not _nem. con._ ‘Down
with the Virgin,’ shouted a big, black-muzzled fellow near the door;
and he meant the Red one too!
‘_A la porte l’espion!_’ roared fifty others back at him. It was a
fight.
He was not alone--‘_à bas la Vierge!_’ repeated his body-guard,
closing round him. The chairs were broken into fragments in an instant,
and I was luckily able to interpose my walking-stick between one of the
fragments and the head of a prostrate man.
So they fell to buffets, the troubled souls who had met to settle the
new law of love, beating each other cruelly with hand and foot. It was
clear possession, and their tormentors were, perhaps, the self-same
legion that once did duty in the swine. They tore each other, in sheer
impatience for the rise of the curtain on the great poetic drama of
the Millennial Reign. They had bad seats for the show, I think; that
had something to do with it; in the comparative airiness of the boxes,
patience does not come so hard.
I strolled away. Out of focus, too, this group of humanity; and worse
than the last!
CHAPTER III.
FLIGHT.
I was really running away now. It was not retreat, but flight; useless
to pretend that I was even looking civilisation in the face.
Some instinct led me to Geneva. There would be safety, I thought, in
its balanced poetry and prose, the mountains held in check by the
tourists, the lake by the hotels.
But I had reckoned without the gentleman whose crown I had saved in the
late _mêlée_. He turned up one day on Rousseau’s Island, and hailed me
as a brother. I assured him I was but a second cousin, at the outside.
It was in vain. He led me to a remote garret in the old town, and
introduced me to a circle of blood relations in democracy, by whom,
after examination, I was received into the family.
I did not mind; only it was hard to find this sort of thing going on
everywhere.
I was evidently found to improve on acquaintance, for, one day, I was
solemnly invited to a polyglot tea party, in another garret, with a
Russian lady making the tea.
It was green tea, fortunately; else it would have been altogether too
absurdly innocent a compound for this entertainment. Everybody but
myself had done something, and I felt quite ashamed to say that I had
only stood on the steps of the Royal Exchange. My sponsor came out in
a new light; he had been first smearer of petroleum at the Ministry
of Finance, during the Commune. He assured us that no other building
burnt half so well. He laid it all on the _rez-de-chaussée_; his
colleagues wasted their stuff on the upper walls. A friend from Spain
had shot three priests in the Carthagena riots, with one discharge
of a blunderbuss. There was an offer to introduce me as one of the
gentlemen who tried to sky London Bridge, so that I might not look
strange, but I hate a false pretence. The lady at the samovar was a
student emissary, who crossed the frontier with despatches, and she
had just come back with news. She had seen the latest execution at
St. Petersburg--two of the brethren and one sister hanging up in the
falling snow, as stiff as frozen ox-tongues. There were other cheerful
reports from Rome, and from Belgrade; and one companion, who was strong
in geography, gave us a bird’s-eye of the whole woeful earth. It was
to much the same effect, only that, further afield, the dull pain of
living was oftener met by endurance than by revolt. We had five minutes
in the native quarter at Amoy, and saw an ingenious device of the needy
to qualify as mendicant cripples, by making their feet rot off. It is
something of a trade secret; but the right way is to tie a cord tightly
round the ankle, till the member mortifies. It is a living--where it
is not certain death. Next, we were with the stark naked casuals,
squatting in the streets of Pekin in winter time, while, gorged with
humanitarian learning, the lordly scholars pass. We came home by way of
Central Asia, and dropped in on the squalid poor of Smarkand lousing
among their quilted rags. The coaling coolies at Aden detained us but
a moment; and, but a moment more, the sponge divers of the Ægean, with
their lungs choked with blood, for the great law of the margin of
subsistence reaches even to the ocean bed.
Next day, I made straight for Genoa. I seemed to labour for breath on
the dry land, and to want the sweet clean sea.
There was an Italian merchantman in port, fitting out for a voyage
round the world. They had macaroni on board; and, if they had boiled
the huge cargo, they might have girdled the globe as they sailed. They
were going to take it to Ceylon and the Philippines, by way of the
Suez Canal, and then, come back by the Horn to pick up something for
the home market. I wanted a ship; they were not averse to a passenger.
Short of ballooning, it seemed the readiest way of giving Civilisation
the slip.
We sailed; and, as I just had the honour to inform you, here I am, on a
peak in the Pacific, and thirteen thousand miles away from the dome of
St. Paul’s--which, as everybody knows, is but a stone’s throw from the
Royal Exchange. For distance, I think this will do.
CHAPTER IV.
ADVENTURE.
How I got there, this chapter will tell.
The calm of that passage of the Indian Ocean!--the days of sunlight,
a little too ardent, perhaps; the nights of moons--the calm of the
spirit, I mean, profounder than the calm of waters. A ship is either
a heaven or a hell; and when it is a heaven, why not let that one
suffice? The world empty, and no papers--no daily report from the sick
bed of civilisation. Who could want more, or less?
Ceylon, with its new faces and its shipman’s bustle, hardly ruffled our
repose, and when it did, I shut my eyes. At the Philippines, it was
much the same. Both are fully described in the Gazetteers.
Then it was hey! for the next long lap to the Horn, with only a call
for water or for wild-fowl, here and there. We were in the Pacific
now, for all its bursts of temper how finely named! Should not all
oceans, boreal or equinoctial, have the same generic title, for, spite
of storm and reef and waterspout, surely their message is peace? Such
stretches of proud, self-sufficing silence in between the gusts, such
comforting assurance, in deepest whispers, of the final rest! Here, on
salt water only, can we set compass for the land voyage. Now and again
it thundered, and the rain crashed down like falling walls of water,
but always my soul was still. If the worst happened, we should still
reach the deepest bottom at last, and find a soft bed in the ooze.
There was magnetic disturbance of a kind, however, in that Italian
skipper. He was not too well acquainted with the course, and he was
subject to scares about cannibals. He feared that the natives of these
parts might prefer him to his macaroni. He had an old Genoese edition
of Cook, and he read it as if it were a deliverance of yesterday.
Whenever we touched at an island, existence seemed hardly worth having
at his price of precaution--scouts, and rear-guard, and main body, all
to effect a positive life insurance against some old woman squatting on
a mat. Poisoned arrows, again, were his peculiar aversion, and, to keep
out of reach of them, he usually directed landing operations through a
trumpet from the ship’s side. In vain I argued that one fear ought to
preclude the other, and that, if they poisoned him, he would certainly
never be fit to eat. Sometimes I tried to reassure him by landing
alone, and returning with an escort of friendly natives, and a store of
yams. The lesson was lost on him; he attributed my safety to the fact
that my joints offered no temptation to the critical eye.
One glorious afternoon, sailing from the south we saw a peak rising
sheer from the ocean and huge, for it still might be about thirty
miles off. It seemed to taper from a broad and solid base, like the
summit of a cathedral. He said, ‘St. Peter’s.’ I said, ‘St. Paul’s.’
As we got nearer, we made out a small island of solid rock, with sharp
precipitous sides, plumped down in the blue, and with no neighbours in
sight. Add Kensington Gardens to Hyde Park, and you might have its
total area. It was covered with verdure and stately trees; but a fringe
of white at the water’s edge showed that, in spite of the perfectly
calm weather, the surf was boiling against its awful shores.
It looked fruity, though desolate, and I insisted on going ashore for
guavas, much to the disgust of the skipper. He offered me dried plums,
in dissuasion, from a box fringed with paper lace, but the sight of
them only increased my craving for the fresh fruit. At last he let
me put off alone, crossing himself as I left the ship’s side; but he
had done this so often that it made no particular impression on me. I
promised to be back in three hours at the outside, while he stood off
and on. There was no anchorage for us, even if there had been time to
let go.
The little place grew in beauty as I neared it, but in grimness, too.
Below the verdure, it was all great fangs of rock, biting into the
sea at the sharpest angles. The surf was more terrible than ever on
a closer view. The water was flaked with the fury of its strife with
the iron-bound shore. I thought of turning back, but I am very fond of
guavas. Besides, I had seen something of the management of boats in
surf, and I fancied it was easier than it looked. The knack is to mount
the crest of a wave, and shoot in with it into a soft place. There was
one soft place here, in the angle of a little bay, with earth and wild
plants sloping to the water’s edge, and for this I made. I thought
I was doing it very nicely, until I felt a heavy blow on the head,
and, just before my eyes closed in a dead faint, saw the boat, bottom
upwards, floating out to sea. I had missed by a hair’s-breadth, and
brushed a boulder half hidden in the grass.
The moon was up when I came to. I must have lain there some hours,
wedged comfortably in the brushwood that clung to the stone, high, and
nearly dry again, though at the outset I was, of course, wet through.
It was a mercy rather than a judgment, after all. The sea had shot me
out of its own reach, and no one could have been more considerately
stunned. There was a slight flesh wound on my forehead, but no bone
broken anywhere. I sat up, and brought my thoughts back to life; then
slowly found my feet, and went to look for my hat. In a few moments I
became aware that there were other things missing, namely, the boat and
the ship.
All were gone. The great stretch of sea was without a speck. I was
alone, abandoned to starvation or other miserable death. I threw myself
on the ground and sobbed.
What had become of the ship? Alas! my theory of probabilities was only
too easy to form. They had found the upturned boat, and perhaps the
hat, had jumped to the conclusion that it was all over with me, and
made off, pursued no doubt, in fancy, by a fleet of cannibal canoes.
And here was I, a second Robinson, on a lonely shore, without so much
as a wreck to start me in housekeeping.
The rock sloped at this place, as I have said, and I easily climbed
to the summit, and looked around. I meant to sit down there, and
form plans. But I forgot all about the morrow, as soon as I saw what
nature had sent me that night. It was the full moon; and to know what
moonlight is you must come to these Southern seas. I had no print to
read, but I could trace the lines in my palm, and I was consoled by the
observation that my line of life was a long one. Behind me were the
massive shadows of higher hills, before, a tableland of grass and wild
trees, bathed in the soothing light, and beyond, the molten silver of
the sea fringed with the everlasting surf. The only landward sound was
the soft ‘click, click’ of some native bird. It was impossible to feel
sad; it was a place to die in, if not to live in, come what might.
The night was warm, I felt no chill, and I sat down and thought the
thoughts one thinks in the moonlight. The pity of it that one should
ever take the trouble to be less than one’s best in this passing
flash of life! What matters the pain for the purchase of this certain
joy--the only joy that is sure, so why not make the most of it in
valour, honour, fortitude, without waiting for aught sweeter in the dim
beatitudes beyond? So to live as, at this moment, thou couldst cease
to live! It is the moon’s message, delivered with unfailing regularity
once a month, and her main business is to deliver it, not to suck up
tides. The shilling almanacs will never contain everything till they
devote a line to this interesting fact. When the moon gets that message
into the soul, all else must make way for it. Stockbroking seems a
pity, in her mildly searching light, with most other modes of getting
on; and no wonder there is a tradition in Bayswater families that this
kind of natural illumination is bad for the eyes.
I, too, was not unmindful of a domestic tradition on the subject; and,
when I felt sleepy, I sought the shade of a hill. I made my bed of
brushwood, and sank down. I ought to have felt cold, and caught cold,
but I did neither--perhaps the very dews were pickled by the sea air.
The sun called me betimes next morning, and I rose at once, painfully
hungry, but in perfect serenity of mind. Now that I saw more of my new
home, I could not think of it as my grave. Before me, to the north
east, rose the tremendous peak we had sighted from the sea. The hills
into which it sank at its base stretched right across the island,
forming a ridge at right angles to the other previously seen from the
ship. I was thus shut in a corner, and I could see nothing of what
lay beyond. I might have seen more by mounting the hill, but I seemed
to dread to do it. I thought I would follow the coast line, from a
vague idea that it would be safer to have the sea at hand. There was no
sign of human life, but the air was alive with myriads of sea birds,
wheeling about the rock. The fly catchers, darting through the air for
breakfast, added to the animation of the scene, but, of course, made
me feel hungrier than ever. There was a distant prospect of a meal,
however, in the wild goats looking down on me from the hills--in grave
wonder, I hoped, at their first sight of a man. Early as it was, tiny
lizards darted about at my feet in evident distress of mind.
Always skirting the rock, I came soon to another peak, lower than the
one first seen, but still awful in its sheer fall of six or seven
hundred feet right into the sea. I lay down, to peep over the almost
perpendicular wall, and rose again with a sense that I and my island
were going to be very cosy together, and all to ourselves. Then,
lifting my eyes to the highest summit beyond me, to measure the breadth
of our domain, I saw a human shape, standing clean and clear and quiet
on the verge, against the cloudless sky.
CHAPTER V.
RESCUE.
It was a woman--so much I could make out, in spite of the distance,
some three hundred yards as the crow flies, though more, of course, by
the dip between the two hills--a woman, by the rounded contours of the
silhouette, and a tall one. Of her face, I could as yet say nothing:
she was looking out to sea.
A woman, then, but of what tribe? There was no telling by the dress.
She wore a petticoat of some dark material, reaching to the knee. It
was but a dark patch, of course, as I saw it; and above it was the
white one of another garment. At first, that was all I made out--the
patch of dark, the patch of white, with the half tint that stood for
her bare limbs. She seemed to be shading her eyes with her hand, as
she stood in the glare of light.
Suddenly she wheeled round, as though to descend the peak, and, in
doing it, saw me. We were now face to face, she on the higher summit,
I on the lower, with only the valley between us. I could not see her
features, but she seemed rooted to the spot with astonishment.
I instinctively felt for a weapon. I expected a scream or a signal,
and savage warriors trooping over the hill. But she made no sign.
Hesitation was out of the question: I moved straight towards her. I had
no beads about me for a peace-offering, so I fumbled at my watch chain,
and wrenched off a propitiatory pencil-case that I hoped might serve.
She advanced too. Then, at every step, the bands of light and dark
began to develop into the most majestic shape of youthful womanhood
I had ever seen. The white was evidently a sleeveless undergarment
reaching, like the petticoat of deep blue, no further than the knee.
The naked arms, legs, and feet were no darker than the cheek of a
brunette. The chemise was low, and above it rose the glorious bust,
almost as broad as a man’s, and with a virgin firmness of line that
was strength and softness too. She was very tall for her sex, tall
even for mine, but the perfect proportion between body and limbs took
off all effect of ungainliness. She moved with the beautiful poise and
precision of a mountaineer, brushing hillock, tuft, and boulder in the
slope, as though they formed but one level.
Would she attack? It looked so, else why had she met my advance so
boldly, without calling her tribe? She seemed to have taken the measure
of me for single combat. She would have been a formidable foe, in any
case, to say nothing of the handicapping in respect for the sex.
But there was no more of aggression than there was of flight in her
attitude, as she paused at last, when but a few feet parted us, and
looking down on me in placid wonder, from large and lustrous eyes,
showed me the peculiar beauty of her face. Her features were regular,
without being faultlessly, or rather, faultily so. Her complexion
would have passed muster for fairness in Provence, if not farther
north. The only signs of race type were in a certain prominence of the
brow, and in the deep liquid softness of the gaze. I had seen such
eyes in some of the Coral Islands, and I used sometimes to wish we
could take a pair of them back with us, to put the Italian women out
of conceit with their own. Her lips were rather full and sensuous, but
this did not impair the tender dignity of her expression. Her dark
hair, shining, I regret to say, with some native oil, which, even at a
distance, I could perceive was scented, seemed to have been caught up
with one sweeping gesture, and gathered in a knot behind. Her feet were
rather large, though perfectly formed; and she had drawn them close
together, as she paused, like a child toeing the line in school. To
complete the similitude, she stood perfectly straight, with her arms
folded behind her, and her head thrown back--her bosom, the while,
gently rising and falling with excitement but half suppressed, and
carrying with it, in its motion, her sole ornament, a common English
navy button, fastened with ribbon to her throat. I had looked on
other women as beautiful in feature, but never on one so magnificently
formed. It recalled poetic ideals of the youth of the race.
Evidently she was waiting for me to say something, but how was I to
say it? The whole Melanesian mission might have been at fault in the
speech of this solitary isle. So I began toying with the pencil-case
once more, and then, in a desperate attempt to recall some characters
of a universal sign language, I folded my hands on my breast--as I had
once seen it done by savages of wilder aspect, in a ballet in Leicester
Square.
No language in the world could do justice to my astonishment at what
followed, and therefore I set it down without comment, just as it
passed.
‘You speak English, I suppose,’ said the girl. ‘How did you come on the
Island?’
The accent was as pure as yours or mine; in fact, there was no accent;
and the voice was as soft as the eyes.
For some moments I could utter no word. I went on with the sign
language, but then, only to pass my hand over my brow.
‘Who are you? and how did you come here? We saw no ship from the Point!’
‘Madam, I----’
The gravity of the features relaxed, and the girl laughed.
‘I knew you spoke English; but why won’t you go on? Oh, how stupid I
am! You are faint and ill. Lean on me, and come and have something to
eat.’ In another moment she was by my side, with one strong arm round
me, and nearly lifting me off the ground, in the attempt to help me to
walk--a most humiliating reversal of protective rôles.
‘I can walk perfectly well, thank you; please let me go,’ I had to
say, like some coy schoolgirl in the grasp of a dragoon. It was very
ridiculous, but I really could not get free.
‘Very well, then, but I will carry you when you like. Now, tell me
who you are, and please don’t call me Madam again. Victoria is my
name--after the Queen--“Victoria.”’
--‘By the grace of God,’ I could not help thinking, remembering what I
had feared, and what I had found.
‘Victoria, I was nearly dashed to pieces on these rocks last night.’
‘Where is your ship?’
‘It was over there, but it has sailed away.’
‘On the south side. But don’t you know that the landing-place is on the
north?’
‘I know nothing. I never thought to find a living, still less a
civilised, soul in this place. Tell me where I am.’
‘You don’t seem to know much geography,’ she said, with an offended
air. But she was mollified in a moment. ‘How faint you must be! Lean
on me. If you don’t, I will carry you, whether you like it or no. Poor
thing!’
I wanted no support, but I was nothing loath to lean upon Victoria. So
we walked away, with an arm round each other’s waist, as innocently
affectionate as the primal pair.
She led me towards another slope of the Peak, and, all too soon for me,
with such leading, we reached the top.
The whole island lay before me, from sea to sea, quivering with life
in the morning sun. In its irregular outline, it seemed like some
quaint sea monster that had shot up from the depths of the Pacific
to take a look round, and that might instantly disappear. It was head
and shoulders out of the water, joining the sea almost everywhere at
the base of perpendicular rocks rising to heights of from four to six
hundred feet, and it had little or no beach. On all sides, the wave
seemed in fretful strife with the rock, but beyond the broken lines
of surf lay the calm of the immeasurable ocean, with nothing in the
way, it seemed, between this and the next world. The range of hills
cutting the island in half from east to west sloped to the edge of the
cliff; on the southern side, in deep valleys, filled with plantation
plots; on the northern, into two terraced spaces, one above the other,
commanding a view of the sea. On the highest of these lay a settlement
of civilised men, its cottages lapped warm, like birds in their mosses,
in exquisite vegetation--palms, and banyans, and cocoa-nut trees, and,
as I might guess, by what was nearer to the view, passion-flowers,
and trumpet vines, and creeping plants of infinite variety, the rich
growth clothing even the adjacent summits and hillsides, and the
sharp inaccessible slopes, right down to the water’s edge. Below
the settlement, on the lower terrace, was a grove of cocoa-trees,
with no habitation, and below this again, a little bay, evidently the
landing-place, and the only one on this cruel shore. All this beauty of
nature and homely sweetness of ordered life, lying to the north of the
dividing ridge, had been hidden from me in my rude landing-place, even
the cultivated valleys being shut out by a transverse section of the
rock.
We were still standing on the hill when, from a clump of cocoa at its
foot, a little girl came running towards us--a reduced copy, to scale,
of Victoria, in build and strength and perfect animal grace. Without
standing in the least upon ceremony, she gave me a most hearty kiss,
and asked me my name.
‘I wonder now if you could read it,’ I said, feeling in my pocket
for the card-case which I had kept by me in all my wanderings, and
extracting from it a card that showed woeful traces of the ducking of
the night before. The little one’s eyes dilated in wonder as she read
the inscription, and in one swift glance took me in from head to foot.
Then she turned, and started for the village, at breakneck speed down
the steep incline, shouting as she went, ‘Mother! mother! Here’s a
lord!’
In a few moments she was mounting the hill on the other side, to the
first terrace, and I lost her for a moment in the cocoa grove. She
emerged into the second steep path that led to the settlement, still
uttering her strange cry. I could see the doors opening, the people
turning out, the terrified flutter of domestic fowl.
‘Come!’ said Victoria, and she strode on in the track of the child,
turning now and then to help me. We soon reached the level of the
grove, a majestic scene, roofed with branches, and carpeted with shrubs
spangled with the sunshine that shot through the trees.
I sank down in the delicious shade, not caring to go farther, not
caring to speak. I was more faint than ever, for, in spite of the
excitement of the adventure, my long fast began to tell.
An opening in the trees showed the path to the settlement, with fifteen
or twenty villagers trooping down under the leadership of the infant
herald, who waved them on with my card. There were women and children,
and, this time, men, most of the latter fit mates for Victoria in frame
and stature. Their shirts were armless, their trousers reached only to
the knee, all beyond was bare bronzed skin. They looked all strength,
suppleness, and abounding health.
A dozen began to talk at once. ‘How did you get him, Victoria?’--‘All
last night!’--‘Oh, the poor thing!’--‘How white his skin is!’--‘Is
he a real lord?’--‘Let me give him a kiss!’--‘Has he had his
breakfast?’--‘He must stay with us.’--‘No, you had the last
one.’--‘With me!’--‘Me! Me!’--It was like a clamour of children, but
it was stilled in a moment on the arrival of an elder, dressed rather
differently from the others, and for whom they all made way.
‘Father,’ said Victoria, addressing the old man, ‘I won’t give him up
to anybody. I found him, and he belongs to me.’
‘Take him to my house,’ said the Ancient, ‘and none of you speak a word
to him till he has had something to eat. Here, Reuben, lend a hand;’
and he nodded to a young fellow standing at least six foot two, who
lifted me to my feet as one might lift a child.
It was time, for their talk began to come to me like a far-off buzzing.
I walked as in a dream, but I was aware of a hushed crowd, a beautiful
path through the trees, a green lawn on the summit, bordered on three
sides with houses of dark wood and thatch, embowered in gardens that
scented all the air. Into one of these houses I was taken, and laid on
a comfortable couch.
‘Where am I?’
‘Hush!’ said Victoria. ‘You are in the house of the chief magistrate of
Pitcairn.’
CHAPTER VI.
BEARINGS.
Pitcairn! I remembered something of what the word meant, next morning,
when I woke from a refreshing sleep.
Who does not know that story, just a century old? A ship of war
from England sent out to these southern seas to fetch breadfruit
for transplantation. Her work easy, her crew passing long delicious
enervating months in this contrasting clime; the southern sky, in lieu
of our murky heavens, the southern woman, in lieu of Deptford Poll.
Then, the breadfruit all collected, the signal given to start for
home, but given by an unpopular commander. Mutiny next. The captain
and a faithful remnant thrust into an open boat, with a handful of
provisions; the crew gently sailing away in search of some happy
isle. One group thinking they had found it in Otaheite, and there
disembarking, leaving the others to steer further forward into the
unknown. These last, finally, spying the dot of Pitcairn, and stopping
there, scuttling their ship to signify ‘Good-bye’ to the world. An
auspicious settlement, with all the comforts--the heathen woman
(imported) and heathen whisky, home made, by an inventor of genius,
who could not find even this morning light sufficiently exhilarating
without his dram; a few native men for service, beside. So, they
began to be happy for ever, according to the most approved methods of
Wapping Old Stairs. Meanwhile, the captain and his faithful remnant,
in the open boat, make the best of their way to England, through sun
and storm; their first halting stage, and nearest prospect of relief
and refreshment, twelve hundred leagues away, their rations weighed to
the twenty-fifth fraction of a pound, and a cocked pistol always ready
for service between the rotting bread and the famished crew. Home at
last; the story told; and another war ship sent out to the Pacific,
to pick up the mutineers. The Otaheitan settlers, or what is left of
them, caught and brought back to hang, or otherwise pay their score;
the Pitcairners never found by the avenger, though she rakes the seas
for them for months. Nothing heard of them for close on twenty years,
when, one day, in the following century, a Yankee skipper, ranging the
smooth ocean, finds this speck of volcanic eruption on its face; and
then the whole story comes out. We left them, it may be remembered,
with liquor and ladies, sunshine and a solitary isle, the honestest
attempt ever made to realise the nautical ideal--said sometimes to
extend to other professions--of a paradise ashore. Alas! it still
was not enough. There had been wild debauchery in both kinds; riot
and midnight murder; sudden and crafty slayings, to the confusion
of all method in the butcher’s art, of men by women, women by men,
Englishmen by natives, and contrariwise, then, of Englishmen, among
themselves. At last, only one man is left, and he of our stock, with
twelve native women in his guardianship, and nineteen children, most
of them fathered by the Englishmen dead and gone. This man, struck
with horror and remorse, takes a turn to piety, and, knowing nothing
of heredity, is simple enough to believe that God gives the race a
fresh start with every generation. So believing, he reclaims this
spawn of hell to Christianity and civilisation, and makes a new human
type. Other varieties may yet be found in the stars; this one owned a
virtue that almost ignored evil, and that was well nigh as effortless
as the love of light. It was strong and gentle, truthful and brave, by
fine instinct; it had an untaught facility of laughter and of tears;
was passionate in loving, yet strange to violent hate--an image of
character that cast no shadows, the most wonderful curiosity in life.
The Yankee skipper soon made his strange discovery known, and then
this colony of half-castes became the pets of the world. English war
ships went to visit them, this time not for vengeance, but to carry
them all whereof they stood in need, in loving gifts. French war ships
looked in, and, charmed with their innocence and simplicity, deigned
to give them leave to hoist a Gallic flag, but showed no resentment
when the offer was declined. America opened her generous hand. It was
a place of pilgrimage; mankind seemed to see much that it might have
been in this outlandish folk, without a war, a debt, a slave class,
or a bottle of brandy to boast of, but only with labour and love. So
much had been omitted, from sheer defect of memory and knowledge in
that poor stranded tar. He had just tried to make them good, and had
left the rest to take care of itself. Suppose he had come earlier, and
caught the whole race on their exit from the Ark. How it might have
spoiled history--all the devilment of the world cleared off, and a
new start made with a germ of good! Well, they multiplied, with this
encouragement, till their numbers threatened to exceed the capacities
of the isle, when a considerate British Government transported them to
another island, ever so far superior, and set them up in housekeeping.
They flourished; but the new island was the great world, and the
gentler spirits among them sighed for their worldlet once more. So
these came back to it; and their children and children’s children are
here, in the old peace and beauty of life, to this day.
CHAPTER VII.
SETTLING DOWN.
So much I remember of my reading, and I slowly bring it back to life,
with much help in concentration from one of the rafters of yellow wood
with which my chamber is roofed. I am steadily gazing at the rafter,
as I have been any time this hour past, when I hear a knock at the
door, give the familiar pass-word, and receive Victoria’s unembarrassed
‘Good-morning’ as she walks majestically in, and takes a seat on the
edge of the bed. I watched her savage cheek for the trace of a blush,
but there was none. I hope she did not watch mine.
‘Must we call you “Lord”?’ she inquired, with grave politeness. ‘Father
says we ought, but I thought I would ask you first.’
I set her mind at rest on this point, and then she became herself of
yesterday, protecting and calm.
‘I came to call you. How long have you been awake? Did you sleep well?’
So many questions, one might say, out of an Ollendorffan First Course
in the language of the island.
‘Delightfully,’ I replied. ‘I hope I have not kept breakfast waiting.’
(Exercise No. 2.)
‘Oh, we have had breakfast long ago,’ said Victoria, now beginning real
talk, ‘and they have all gone to work; but I stayed at home to look
after you.’
‘What kind of work?’
‘Well, work in the plantations--how do you suppose we get our yams?’
‘What else?’
‘Listen’--and I heard a muffled sound of beating from the back of the
house. I had heard it before, but it had passed unnoticed--‘Can’t you
guess what they are doing there?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘They are making cloth, tappa cloth. See, here is some of it;’ and she
showed me the snowy counterpane of my bed. ‘We make it from the bark
of a tree. I’ll show you, by-and-by. We like English cloth better,
though, when we can get it. I always dress in English cloth.’
‘So you have done no work to-day, Victoria, all because of me.’
‘Oh yes, I have. I have cooked your breakfast, and caught it too. Do
you like fish?’
‘What fish?’
‘Squid.’
‘I hope I do,’ I said fervently--‘I am sure I do.’
‘Such fun! I had to go in three times for him, and was washed off
twice.’
‘I don’t quite understand.’
‘In the surf, you know. They cling to the rocks; and you have to catch
them before the sea comes back and catches you.’
I remembered my dismal attempt to rule the waves the night before last,
and was silent with humiliation.
She must have read my thoughts with her clear eye. ‘Oh, none of _you_
can swim; and no wonder--you have such nice ships to swim for you. I
must give you a few lessons. We will go right round the island--I will
look after you. But not till you are stronger. Are you strong to-day?’
asked Victoria, with the tenderest solicitude, looking down on me as on
a babe in its cot.
Upon my word, I thought she was going to offer to dress me. ‘As a
lion,’ I returned, determined to resist this last indignity to the
death.
‘Well, make haste, and get up,’ said Victoria, and she rose and walked
out--no better enlightened as to the proprieties, I am afraid, than
when she came in.
I was soon in the next room; and for some minutes I had it to myself.
This gave me time to look round. It was a long chamber, with windows
on one of the longer sides, or rather unglazed openings that might be
closed with a shutter. On the opposite side were two beds in recesses
facing the light, and screened by sliding panels that made each recess
a tiny bed-chamber. Portholes in the wall above the beds would admit
light when the panels were closed. They were not closed now; and the
beds, with their coverlets of spotless tappa, formed no insignificant
part of the furniture. It appeared to be the great common room of the
house, serving all purposes by turns. My breakfast things, spread on a
white cloth, stood on the table. There was a large clothes press in one
corner, of home make, I should say, but still the work of a craftsman.
An old-fashioned writing-desk, in another corner, was evidently from
Europe. Floor, walls, and ceiling were of the yellow wood already
noticed. There was no fireplace; but a well-stored bookcase hung over
what might have been the mantel. In other respects, the place was like
a cabinet of curiosities. There were articles of use or ornament that
must have come out of the old scuttled ship, with others that were, as
clearly, recent gifts from Europe. Some of the gifts were useful; a few
would have been purely ornamental, even in the boudoir of a duchess.
There was a good timepiece, side by side with a machine for moistening
postage stamps. A copper tea-kettle divided the honours of a little
sideboard with a miniature chest of drawers, in morocco leather, for
the storage of cash--labelled ‘Gold,’ ‘Silver,’ ‘Notes,’ in letters
richly embossed. A huge shoehorn in ivory, tapering to a button hook
in polished steel, hung against the wall, near an old-fashioned native
club. Kind-hearted people at home seemed to have had happy thoughts
about the Pitcairn plunders while walking down Bond Street, and to have
rushed into the first fancy-shop, and bought the first thing that came
to hand. The islanders were none the worse for it; they had received
these gifts as so much European fetich, and reverently laid them by,
without attempting to discover their use.
I was still enjoying this strange feast of the eye, when the Ancient of
yesterday, the Governor of the Island, came in. He was between fifty
and sixty, tall, straight, and strong, and, in many points of look
and manner, a strange survival of the old-fashioned man-of-war’s man,
though he might never have trod a vessel’s deck. He was dressed like
a seaman, in blue pilot cloth with brass buttons, that must have come
from England. He had the inheritance of a pigtail and side locks, in
his way of trimming his hair. He was no swarthier than an English tar
who has seen service, in spite of his cross of native blood. He had
softer manners, however, than one would look for in his great original.
Yet, to say the best for him, he came somewhat short of the common
conception of a Governor. His face had something of the grave beauty of
Victoria’s, without any trace of its spiritual charm.
--‘Hope you are better, sir,’ said his Excellency, laying his hat
on the writing-desk, and holding out his hand. One thing especially
charmed me in him, as, afterwards, in all of them. He was as free as
a Spanish peasant from all subservience of manner born of a sense
of difference in social grade. None of them seemed to know their
station, although, strangely enough, this implied no ignorance of their
Catechism. The secret of my unfortunate position at home, as revealed
by the visiting card, made me an object of curiosity, but not in the
least of deference, still less, if possible, of ill will. They seemed
to feel without explanation--what I was at first so anxious to tell
them--that it was no fault of mine.
After compliments, he gave me his history, in reply to my eager
questions. He was the grandson of an English mutineer; and both his
father and mother were of mixed English and native blood. So, too, was
his wife--now dead. Victoria was his only child. The very mention of
her, I could see, brought a faint glow of pride to his bronzed cheek;
and when she came in, bearing a smoking dish for my breakfast, he
embraced her as lovingly as though they had not met for months.
‘Be careful, father, or you’ll upset the bird,’ said the girl, as she
laid a baked fowl on the table, which was quite a master-piece as a
colour study in luscious browns. It took three journeys to complete
her preparations; and then I was invited to sit down to the most
deliciously novel repast ever spread before me--grey mullet, and the
mysterious squid, now turning out to be the more familiar cuttle-fish,
to take off the sharper edge of appetite; the baked bird, with yams,
roasted breadfruit, and plantain cake to follow; bananas, oranges, and
cocoa-nuts for dessert. The liquors, I am bound to say, were a failure.
I was offered water with the fish, and cocoa-nut milk with the bird;
and, I suppose, my passing spasm of pain caught Victoria’s eye.
‘I knew he would never like it,’ she said to her father, ‘I must make
him some tea, this minute,’ and she flew outside once more.
I followed, with a bunch of bananas in my hand, to entreat her not to
execute her kindly intention, and then I discovered that the kitchen
was in the open air. It was the old Otaheite oven, described by
Cook--heated stones in a hole in the ground, the food laid on them, and
covered with more heated stones, which, in their turn, were covered
with leaves and cleanly rubbish to keep out every particle of cold.
Half an hour in this bath of hot air cooks a fowl to perfection. Other
things were new and strange to me. The houses stood about a yard above
the soil on huge sleepers of stone, and these sleepers, again, were
laid on low terraces of earth, for further security against damp. Each
house was surrounded by its own plot--a garden in front, and in the
rear a miniature farm-yard, and offices, including the oven, and a shed
for the making of cloth. The roofs were thatched with leaves, and most
of the dwellings had an upper floor.
CHAPTER VIII.
GOVERNMENT, ARTS, AND LAWS.
Victoria goes afield, and I return to the house, to smoke with the
Ancient, and to interview him on government, arts, and laws. This is
what I learn.
Our population, men, women and children, is less than one hundred souls.
Our arts--well, we till the soil, as aforesaid, but in our own way. The
plough and the windmill were unknown to us a few years ago. We breed a
little stock, and we exchange wool and tallow for flour and biscuit,
with passing ships. When a ship comes to us, we grow wild with joy, and
it is fête day throughout the island.
We get most things in this way, and our latest transaction in barter
was for slate pencils and files, of which we stood much in need. The
school was reduced to chalk and the blackboard. For a long time, we
were greatly at a loss for wedding rings; and the one ring on the
Island had to be lent for each successive ceremony. This want is now
supplied.
Coin is a curiosity: we have but two sovereigns, a dozen half-crowns,
with a choice assortment of minor pieces, and one fourpenny bit. This
last stands under an inverted tumbler, which constitutes our nearest
approach to a numismatic museum. The collection might increase, if
only the ladies could consent to part with their jewelry, for our few
English coins are worn as ornaments. There are American dollars in
greater plenty, but the currency is chiefly in potatoes.
We think of raising cotton, which would thrive very well in this
latitude, and it is quite possible that, in a few years, we may be no
longer dependent on Europe for shirts. It would add much to our sense
of dignity, and, beside, would tend to make us more self-supporting, in
the event of complications with a foreign power.
We have no navy to speak of, but there is a first-rate whale boat. The
steersman of the whale boat is also Magistrate, or Governor of the
Island--my host. There is precedent for it: Pitt, I believe, was First
Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the same time.
The Governor is elected annually, by universal suffrage of both sexes.
O that Governor!
He has just laid down his pipe, to fish the Revised Statutes out of the
pocket of his pilot coat. ‘We make ’em as we want ’em,’ he says simply,
‘but I hope we shall soon want no more. There’s quite enough already,
to my mind.
‘You see, sir, the first is a “Law Respecting the Magistrate” (that’s
me, for the present). He’s to carry out the laws, and when there’s any
complaint to call the people together and hear both sides. Everyone is
to treat him with respect. But they all do, you know, without that,’
his Excellency was pleased to add.
‘Then there’s a “Law Regarding the School.” All children to go; or to
pay, whether they go or not. Fee, a barrel of Irish potatoes a year, or
thereabouts.’
‘A barrel of Irish potatoes, you see, in our currency, stands for
twelve shillings, and the school fee is a shilling a month. A barrel of
sweet potatoes is only eight shillings. Three good bunches of plantains
make four shillings, and so on.
‘On the 1st of January we visit landmarks, first thing after the
election, and see they are all right.
‘Then there’s a law about drinks, sir--as I dare say you know. No
strong liquor on the Island, except for physic. You see, we gave liquor
a trial when our people first came here, and the man that invented it
went funny, and jumped into the sea. It seemed to bring bad luck, so we
gave it up.
‘Now we come to our great difficulty,’ and he proceeded to read aloud
another chapter of the statutes headed, ‘Laws for Cats.’ ‘Cats, you
must know, sir, are very useful in keeping down rats, but our young
people will sometimes shoot them for sport, so we’ve been obliged to
pass a very severe law, our severest, I may say. There’s a heavy fine
for killing a cat, half of it to go to the informer. For all that,
it’s no easy matter to settle these cases. Sometimes people say the
cat came to kill their fowls; and what are you to do then? It is a
difficult case for a magistrate. I always say this--was the cat caught
killing the bird; or was it merely a suspicion? If you can’t produce
your dead bird, then down with your potatoes! There’s another way; you
may pay your fine in rats killed by yourself. Three hundred is the
price of a cat’s life; we try to be fair all round.
‘Take fowls again; if a fowl trespasses in your garden, you may shoot
it, and the owner must return you your charge of powder and shot.
That’s the law as it stands in the book, but nowadays you generally
send back the bird, and say no more about it. We are all neighbours,
you know.
‘There’s another thing,’ continued his Excellency, pursuing his
commentary on the code, ‘You mustn’t carve on trees. Who wants to
carve on trees? you may say. Well, the young people, when they are
a-courting. But it ruins the timber. We’ve had no end of trouble with
that law. As you walk about the Island, sir, you’ll come upon true
lovers’ knots, and such like, in the most out of the way places.
You mustn’t be startled by ’em, and think it’s savages; it’s just
sweethearts, neither more or less. Where we can’t tell which pair
was walking there, I draws ’em all up in line, and asks who did it,
straight out. Oh, you have to look sharp after things here, I do assure
you. Our people are not so wicked, but they get careless sometimes.
Who’d ever think, now, that we want a “Law for the Public Anvil”? but
we do.’ And he read aloud,
‘“Any person taking the public anvil and public sledge-hammer from the
blacksmith’s shop is to take it back after he has done with it; and, in
case the anvil and sledge-hammer should get lost, by his neglecting to
take it back, he is to get another anvil and sledge-hammer, and pay a
fine of four shillings”--potatoes, you know.
‘You’ve got a good many more laws in Europe, I’ve heard say,’ he
observed, as he closed his book, and restored the entire code of
Pitcairn to his breast pocket.
‘You have not been misinformed,’ I replied. ‘But tell me--have you any
machinery of appeal from the decisions of the Court of First Instance?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if they don’t like what I tell ’em, it goes before a
jury.’
‘And if they don’t like that any better?’
‘Then we hold over till the next British man-o’-war touches, and the
captain decides. We’ve got an appeal waiting now--a cat case. None of
us can get to the rights of it, so we must wait: but the parties are
friendly enough, meanwhile.’
‘Have you ever carried a case to the House of Lords?’
‘We shouldn’t like to trouble you, sir, thank you, all the same.’
CHAPTER IX.
NURSE.
Victoria is my nurse. There is no doubt of it: I am in her charge. She
governs all my goings out, and my comings in, and is told off, I think,
to see that I do not drown myself, or fall off the rocks. For a few
days I see next to nothing of the others. They are gone out to work
long before I get up, and I catch mere glimpses of them in our walks
afield. They come up in the evening, to look at me through the windows,
but Victoria heads them off, with a promise to produce me on Sunday. I
am supposed to be convalescent in the meanwhile. I am quite content,
and I sham.
The housewives, of course, see me, as I walk through the village. They
have all kissed me, nobody objecting, I least of all. I am the best of
friends with the children, and these always call me ‘Lord.’ Victoria
calls me by my Christian name.
She wakes me in the morning, feeds me as aforesaid, then takes me for
an airing, perhaps to St. Paul’s Point, a thousand feet high, which
affords a fine bird’s-eye view of infinitude. When the ascent becomes
unusually steep, she grasps me by the arm, and pushes me up. It is
useless to try to shake her off; I need her as much in that country as
Gulliver needed Glumdalclitch elsewhere. The goats can hardly follow us
sometimes. Her education has been neglected in the matter of nerves;
she stands on perpendicular summits, and coils her hair; she drops on
ledges of rock less than a yard wide, to rescue a stray kid, and walks
to and fro on them with a certitude that precludes courage. Never have
I felt so small. There is nothing to keep up the fiction of knightly
service, not a fan to hold, a carriage door to open, a wrap to arrange.
So I make no more pretence of homage to the sex than any other infant
in charge. Fractiousness, on the contrary, is rather my cast of mind;
if anything, I am a troublesome child.
In all things she is a model nurse, and especially in this, that she
teaches me to tell the truth. I had no idea of what truthfulness
might mean, till I came here. Victoria never says the thing that is
not, and she sometimes misses the most tempting effects of humour, in
consequence. Her yea is yea, her nay, nay. So, it seems, the primitive
founder from Wapping understood his charge under the Writ. Whatever is
she states as it is, and this mere habit often gives her talk the charm
of classic prose. The Ancient, as we have seen, in his love-knot cases,
supplies the want of a detective police by public confession. I praised
her once for this virtue; she said I had strange ideas.
It kills coquetry, though. ‘I don’t think you care for me one bit,
Victoria,’ I said one day. ‘Why should I care for you?’ I, of course,
expected on her part, as the next move in the game. All the best
treatises lay this down as the appropriate answer. But Victoria simply
played the native gambit. ‘I am sure I do: I like you very much. How
stupid of me never to think of telling you! So does father too.’ I
threw a stone at a goat, by way of changing the subject, and Victoria
redoubled her attentions all the way home. I could only throw more
stones at the goats. Shooting, alas! was out of the question: all the
live things were stock, and they had no stock to spare.
She tells me stories, like the best of nurses, stories of that
unregenerate early time, when evil was killing itself out of the
island, and the Devil stinging himself to death with the fork of his
own tail. There is a story of an awful night, which I often ask for.
All the native men had risen on all the English, and left but one
of them alive, the future law-giver, and him half dead. Then, when
darkness fell, the native women stole on the sleeping murderers, and
finished them. This was the last massacre; the Devil was dead in
Pitcairn. The scene is always with me, as the background of the picture
of to-day. Here the sweet benignant maids and wives, the sunshine and
the peace; there the dusky furies they sprang from, stealing forth in
the night to the deed of blood. Love redeemed, if it did not justify;
and ah, how these Southern women possess that finest of the arts! At
Tahiti--it is another of Victoria’s stories--when the avenging war
ship came out to fetch the mutineers home to be hanged, one of them was
torn from the side of Peggy, his native wife, who held an infant at her
breast. He lay heavily ironed on deck, when Peggy climbed the side,
infant and all, from a canoe--as it was thought, only to say a discreet
good-bye. But Peggy behaved without discretion, throwing herself on the
poor manacled wretch, hugging his very fetters, to get a little nearer
the father of her baby, and sobbing the most heart-breaking things to
him in the _patois_ of her isle. He turned, and begged she might be led
away, as though he were already tasting something sharper than death.
Led away she was, and sent back in her canoe, and she made such haste
to die of a broken heart that she was at peace long before he went
down in his irons in the storm that nearly destroyed the whole ship’s
company, captives and all, on the homeward voyage.
Once, it might have been a ghost story. I am walking with Victoria at
night, through a deep gorge, to show her the scene of my disaster in
the landing. A high ridge bounds the valley; and chancing to raise
her eyes to it, the girl suddenly utters a cry of terror, and clings
all trembling to me. ‘Tell me what it is--I cannot look at it.’ Then,
as suddenly, she flings herself away from me, cowering, and will not
be touched; and, with hands clasped, utters more cries of mystery,
in which I am not concerned. ‘Oh!--if!--speak to me, only! come to
me! I have not forgotten, I have not done wrong.’ There is certainly
something stirring up there, in the green moonlight, but Victoria will
in nowise let me obey her order to find out what it is, but draws me
back into the shadow of the gorge, and insists on our hurrying home.
Amiable and harmless ghost, the girl is mute about thee, and I am fain
to be content with thy biography from the Ancient’s lips. The Ridge
is haunted by the phantom of a murdered chief, another of the victims
of that old wild time. The news of our adventure spreads through the
settlement, and no one peeps in at the windows that night.
She takes me for walks, too, the cunningest. There is a wild cave at
the western end, where one of the mutineers, ever haunted by the
dread of that avenging ship, used to entrench himself against possible
attempts at capture that were never made. He would sit there whole
summer days, his eye on a narrow rim of rock that led to his cavern,
and that one man might, with ease, have kept inviolate against a
hundred. He was provisioned and stored for a long siege, and a hard
fight; and as he sat watching through the long hours, no doubt he had
his thoughts. The eastern end has its cave too, another sanctuary,
but of far-off aboriginal man, who carved sun, moon and stars on its
walls, and then retired into eternal oblivion and the night of things.
The vanished one’s modest avoidance of publicity could not fail to be
remarked, in spite of him. He had found, or made, his cavern, in the
face of a wall of rock that rose some six hundred feet sheer from the
foaming sea. A few feet from the summit, there was a ledge just wide
enough to support a man, and this was the pathway to his chapel of
little ease.
At our first visit, Victoria dropped on the ledge with the mingled
lightness and precision of fall of a weighted feather, forbidding me
to follow, on pain of death. I did follow, in spite of the prohibition,
whereupon she stood stock still on the ledge, till I could recover
touch of her, and then burst into tears. The tears saved me, for I was
beginning to look down the wall into the surf, and that way self-murder
lay. They made me look up at Victoria, though I could not see her face.
She recovered herself in a moment. ‘Now you will shut your eyes,’ she
said, ‘lay both hands on my shoulders, and walk straight on after me.’
So we reached the cave, when she turned and faced me, and began to cry
once more. ‘How am I to get you back? Why, not all _our_ people can
walk here--only the youngest! I will never take you out again, _never_;
I mean, _perhaps_ I never will.’ I examined the curiosities of the cave
meanwhile, and assumed a silent, remorseful air. Then came the return
journey. ‘Try to forget all about the scolding,’ said Victoria, ‘I
take it back--for the present--and do just as you did before.’ It was
done; and I declare the indefinable charm of companionship with her
in peril was a sufficient antidote to fear. ‘Now,’ she said, when we
reached the end of the pathway, ‘keep your eyes shut, and hold on to
this till I come to you.’ And she guided my hand to a small projection,
and scrambled, by what I afterwards found was an almost perpendicular
facet, to the top of the rock. In a few seconds, something soft touched
my face; it was a long woollen girdle, that Victoria sometimes wore,
and she had lowered it to my aid. I, too, reached the level at last. ‘I
shall not speak to you for some time,’ she said, resuming the quarrel,
and she stalked on ahead, I meekly following without a word. She turned
as we reached the path leading to the settlement. ‘Do you unfeignedly
repent?’ When she was most serious she often talked the English of
the Church Service, and without the faintest sense of incongruity.
‘Victoria, I can hardly find words--’ ‘Very well, then: I forgive you
from my heart, though, you know, I am not obliged to forgive you till
sundown. But it would be a pity to waste an afternoon.’
We finished the day in great amity, under the shade of a banyan tree,
whither we retired for consultation on a matter that gave Victoria some
perplexity of spirit. She had lately bought a Milton from a passing
ship--with her own savings in potatoes--and had read it through so
often that she knew long passages by heart. The work had left in her
mind an impression of unfairness in the treatment of Satan, and she was
most anxious to submit this difficulty to the judgment of a friend. I
was at first disposed to make light of it, but I soon saw that Victoria
took it very seriously indeed. They had but few books; each book went
the round of the settlement; and it was taken in most edifying good
faith, as a report from that visionary outer world, that unexplored
planet, whose laws, customs, institutions, ways of being and doing were
such a mystery to the worldlet of the rock. The hero of the latest
volume to hand, novel, history or poem, no matter what its date, was
always the personage of the day at Pitcairn. His difficulties were the
living issues in politics, morals, and the art of life.
‘I am going to say something about it at the meeting to-morrow night;
but I thought I should like to speak to you first. I do not think he
was properly treated, though Mr. John Milton seems to have no pity for
him, and he ought to know. Yet I cannot think it. I could hardly sleep
at all, last night; it troubled me so.’
‘Well, Victoria, I suppose he staked his stake, and lost, and had to
put up with the consequences; that is all I see.’
‘Yes, but perhaps if they had only been kinder to him, he might have
repented. He was very proud, you know, and there was no one to soothe
him. I think Gabriel was very haughty and hard with him, and Zephon
quite disrespectful, considering his place. Do you always approve of
Gabriel?’ she asked, with much earnestness, and looking me straight in
the eyes, as though our friendship depended on the answer. ‘Surely,’
she said, with rising warmth, ‘you would never stand up for that
speech at the end of the fourth book. Rulers should not be so high and
distant, just clearing their throats, and giving their commands, as
though all others were servants. Suppose father ruled like that--who
would obey the laws? I know Satan felt it. It is a pity he had no
good female angel to take care of him--only there is no marrying, nor
giving in marriage there: so they say,’ and she sighed. ‘People may
meet again, though, without marrying,’ she said after a pause, and with
her eyes fixed on the vacancy of sea and sky. ‘Thank God for that!
But oh what meetings, if they have not been true!’ She seemed to have
forgotten Satan for a moment, I thought, but I soon brought her back to
the case before the court.
‘There was an attempt to bring feminine influence to bear on him, I
believe, but it hardly turned out well.’
‘When? where? Mr. John Milton says nothing about it.’
‘No, that comes from another reporter, a Frenchman. It did not answer.
A pitying angel left Paradise, to come and speak comfort to him, as he
lay writhing on his hot bed. She was fearful, though compassionate, and
she meant always to keep out of arm’s length. But her pity drew her too
near, all the same, and he clutched her, and dragged her down. So runs
the tale.’
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Victoria firmly, ‘I think he never
had a chance. I shall say so at the meeting; and you back me up.’
CHAPTER X.
SUNDAY.
I was produced on Sunday before the whole settlement; more strictly
speaking, they produced themselves before me. The villagers were in
the village, for the first time, at my hour of rising. There was an
absolute cessation from labour, but there was hardly rest. They were
in a flutter of joyous excitement, and ran from cottage to cottage, as
though they were spreading good news. Yet there was no news, for who
could need telling that it was Sunday, and that the sky was blue? For
that matter, they needed no excuse to make free of each other’s houses.
Property in their own roofs seemed the merest accident among them. One
man’s arm-chair was another man’s arm-chair. They walked in and out,
by the open doors--often into unguarded dwellings, when the owners
were on a visit elsewhere--read the books, smelt the flowers, touched
the harmonium, if they could, or cared, and came away. When you sought
a man, you went into the nearest cottage; you never thought of going
first to his own, unless it lay in your path. There was more of this
curious house to house visiting to-day, because there was more time for
it, and because there was a greater intensity of childlike happiness in
movement and communion--that was all.
There seemed to be much borrowing and lending of the Sabbath finery of
cleanliness. If you had no better coat for the day, why, your neighbour
might have one to spare, and you asked him for it. Victoria lent two
loose gowns, a kind of _robe de chambre_ worn on state occasions over
the scanty costume of the women. At the same time, she went into a
neighbour’s garden, and helped herself freely to flowers for her hair,
our own stock having suffered from the movements of some four-footed
intruder during the night. If Proudhon had lived here, he would have
written ‘property is vanity,’ the innermost truth. Victoria was very
smart--a new ribbon for the navy button, beside the blossoms inwoven
with her shining locks.
The church was a hut. I have seen St. Peter’s, too, yet I give this
one the preference for majesty, taking its surroundings into account.
For St. Peter’s, as the best thing in its quarter, all else meaner,
leads nowhere beyond itself, while this island fane, backed first by a
stately tropic grove, then by a towering cone of mountain, then by the
clouds, carried the eye from height to height of beauty and of wonder,
right up to Heaven.
We were rather late, and it was all the better, for now I could take
in the whole population of the island at a glance. They were mostly
of superb physique, men and women, and Victoria was but one finest
example of them. Reuben, the young giant, who had helped me on the day
of landing, was another. Among the women, however, some foolish hat,
or trailing skirt, of civilisation here and there departed from the
classic simplicity of Victoria’s dress. Most of the men wore shoes, in
honour of the day; a few, like the Ancient, long trousers, instead of
the loose knee-breeches of their working suits. Trousers seemed to
be a sign of authority, or of the beginning of years. The priest, or
ministrant, wore them, and indeed he might have been entitled to wear
two pairs, for, I think, he was schoolmaster as well. The types varied
from Victoria’s front of Western Europe to almost pure Tahiti, but
always they had their point of unity in the large soft eyes.
For the service, never had I seen such fervour, such passion of prayer
and praise! It was the Church of England form, I believe, but form of
any kind was hardly to be recognised in the melting heat of their zeal.
The poor old Litany seemed like a veritable audience at the throne
of God. The Commandments came as His voice from our own mountain,
thundering from the summit of the cone. Our hymns soared after Him to
the very farthest heaven as He retired. One boy’s note, I think, must
have got there first, so clear was it, so clean and pure and true, with
nought of earth to keep it from the skies. It was a living faith, no
mere specimen of what once had lived, dried for keeping, and not even
dried in the sun. Here were the true Primitives, the joyous band of
Galilean vagabonds, exulting in that new conception of the brotherhood
of man whose secret we have for ever lost. Solemnity, as we understand
it, seemed far from them; devoutness was swallowed up in joy. Often
they laid their hands affectionately on each other’s shoulders as they
sang: once I saw two children kiss after a prayer.
I had been completely ignored during the service, but, when it was
over, my turn came. As we trooped back towards the village, I was
the centre of a questioning crowd. I had come from England--that was
enough, for England is their great archetype of power, wisdom, and
beauty of life. Needless to say they have not seen it; I mean, of
course, that circumstance has bound them to their rock. All that they
know as best comes from England, from the great war ship, which they
regard with almost the wonder of Indians, down to the harmonium in the
cottage. It is not much to know, but a generous imagination easily does
the rest. England has been good to them: England, then, is goodness.
She is visibly strong: then she is strength. She has sent them Bibles;
ah! she must be the Word made Flesh.
So it was one long bewildering inquisition. Would I tell them of the
great churches, the great wonders manifold of that far-off Isle of
the Saints? What of the rulers and statesmen, of the bishops, those
captains of captains of the thousands of God, of the choirs of the
faithful--five thousand strong, as they had heard--hymning Handel under
a crystal dome? They seemed to see human life not at all as a mere
struggle, but as a great race for a crown of virtue, in which Britain
was first, and their poor island so decidedly nowhere that she could
afford to sink rivalry in unqualified admiration. I winced, and winced,
and winced again.
‘We are but poor things here, and we know it,’ said the schoolmaster.
‘You will improve,’ I said kindly.
‘Well, sir, we are always ready to learn; perhaps you would like to
take a service yourself next Sunday? You are not in orders, but you
have heard the Archbishop of Canterbury, I dare say.’
‘No, only a bishop now and then.’
‘Oh, what opportunities!’ said Victoria sadly. ‘We once had a
navy-chaplain here, but it was four years ago. Though, of course, that
is no excuse for our not being better than we are.’
‘They say he has fifteen thousand a year to spend on the poor,’ said
the schoolmaster, returning to the Primate.
‘Yes, he has fifteen thousand a year.’
‘How much would that be in potatoes, let’s see?’ murmured Reuben, and
he withdrew for an operation in mental arithmetic.
‘I’ve heard of a lady who has made fifty thousand people happy, all by
herself,’ said one of the women. ‘She’s a baroness.’
‘And that’s not the highest,’ said another, ‘there’s duchesses who must
be richer. Oh, what a country for the poor!’
‘It’s the big churches I’m thinking of,’ observed the schoolmaster.
‘Why, there’s one that holds six thousand people. Six thousand people,
twice a day! Think of the spread of it!’
‘Them’s the things I want to see,’ said Reuben, returning, not
unoppressed, I thought, by his weight of potatoes, ‘the big things--St.
Paul’s, the Railway.’
‘You should use the plural form, Reuben,’ urged the schoolmaster
gently, ‘the railways. There are dozens of them. Why, there are three
great lines running to Birmingham! I’ve got a map of it.’
‘And how about the Parliament?’ struck in the Ancient, pre-occupied,
and not unnaturally, with the question of legislation. ‘Over a thousand
people to make the laws; and at it day and night, too! The moment
anything goes wrong anywhere, there they are, waiting on the premises,
as you may say, to put it right. We’ve nothing like that here. Not that
we want it either; I only make the remark.’
This touching disposition to take us in good faith had no limits. In
their quaint conception of our corporate life, all things existed to
that great end of the crown of virtue. Nothing was merely neutral or
indifferent. To talk of making people virtuous by Act of Parliament
would, for them, have had none of the significance of a sneer. What
else were Acts of Parliament for? So, churches were to promote
brotherhood and love, with no reserves for a Pickwickian sense; armies,
to suppress the wicked. Rank and riches, as we have just seen, were
mere equivalents for more opportunity; if a baroness made fifty
thousand people happy, what might not a duchess do? The islanders
simply multiplied our means by their own yearnings, and the product was
a colossal sum in good. Everything seemed to count; from a question the
Ancient put to me as to the number of cabs and omnibuses in the British
capital, I more than suspect that these, too, contributed to his grand
total. The drivers were obliging persons whose chief concern was to
give tired Righteousness a lift.
‘I want to see St. Paul’s and the railways,’ murmured Reuben again, in
an amended version, as he wandered away from the group.
Victoria’s wistful gaze went after him: ‘Poor fellow!’
‘Is anything the matter with him, Victoria?’
‘Yes, but he daren’t tell anyone but me; he wants to go.’
‘To go where?’
‘Out there,’ she said, with a gesture that was meant to indicate the
world at large. ‘He wants to see it all; he can never rest here.
These things our people talk about with strangers trouble him. He’s
venturous; he must see and know. He was always like that: he dived two
fathoms lower than anyone else--off the Point, and brought up a watch
from the old ship. No one can follow him on the rocks. He discovered
an island once--over there. I went to see it: I’ll take you one day.
Now it’s England. He can never rest here. But, oh! how I dread it! and,
besides, you know, they will never let him go.’
‘Did he find so much in the first island, then, that he longs to try
the other?’
‘No; only some dry bones in a cave. But England will be different, of
course.’
They prayed and praised, in the exultant fashion of the morning, all
day long--with due intervals for refreshment. There were five services,
I think, big and little. If there were not six, it was only because
this Sunday did not happen to fall on the longest day.
‘I hope it is because we love God,’ said Victoria, ‘but I think it is
just as much because we love one another. Or perhaps it is to bring
Him nearer, so that we may love Him like the rest. He must not be too
far off. I think that is why some of the poor wild people we read of
take so long to convert. You must show them something, and let them
feel the strong arm, and see the face of human love. They always want
to worship the missionary first. Why not let them; and then pass it on,
when they get stronger? Do you know, in spite of all my advantages, I
could sometimes just fall down and say my prayers to a child, to things
even--a rose-tree? It’s the old wickedness in our blood, I suppose. But
mind, don’t you dare tell anybody; I should die of shame!’
I had begged to be excused from attendance at the remaining four
services, on the ground that I preferred an open-air rite; and, on
my assurance that this mode of devotion had the sanction of British
custom, Victoria had consented to join me. We were wandering, talking,
musing in long silences, picking wild-flowers, breathing the balmy air,
basking in the warm light.
In one of these reveries I caught a strange gleam in Victoria’s eyes.
‘Tell me about the blessed Sabbaths in England,’ she murmured, placing
her hand in mine.
O my England, my England! why cannot I speak of a thing we all must
honour so? why, rather, do I pray for strength to keep the secret
of thy Sabbaths well? Dread day of the division of classes, weekly
vision of the Judgment, in its utter separation of the social sheep
and goats, never one flock, alas! at any time, but now so clearly
two. In this dark hour of remembrance, I hear the hoarse clappers of
thy meeting-houses, vainly fanning the stagnant air in cities of the
spiritual dead. I see thy funereal processions of the elect, wending
to or from the conventicles, past groups of coster-boys, who wait for
the opening of the houses, and expectorate on the pavement in patterns
of the dawn of decorative art. It is all before me, the dingy squalor
of thy miles of shuttered marts, the crying contrasts of thy Sunday
finery, more hurtful to the eye than thy week-day rags! I hear thy
muffin-bells in the deep silences, and thy hawkers’ wail; and, amid
this worst of all spiritual destitution, the destitution of beauty, I
ask myself, what is it that we have lost; what is it these little ones
have found?
CHAPTER XI.
A SAIL.
I was roused next morning by the report of a gun, followed by a strange
commotion in the village. I had barely time to dress, and join the
Ancient in the sitting-room, when a man ran in, breathless, to announce
a ship off the Point, and a Queen’s ship.
A Queen’s ship! No wonder the village was astir. A ship that might
fly the Royal Standard, a ship that was English authority and English
might! No work in the Island this day!
The Ancient put on his Sunday coat, and quietly took command. ‘How
lucky the landing is easy this morning! Jonah, hurry off to the Point,
with the white flag, and signal their cutter “All right!” Quintal, you
go down to the landing, and see them over the breakers. Now, folks,
who’s to take them in?’
It was a call to public meeting on the question of the entertainment of
the officers. The islanders always claimed this privilege of boarding
and lodging the Queen’s uniform. Half a dozen heads of families at once
offered to provide for as many guests. There was a brisk competition
for the Captain, who would have fallen to the Governor _ex-officio_,
but for my occupancy of the spare bedroom in his Excellency’s house. I
offered to retire, but my generous hostess would not hear of it.
‘I found him, father, and he belongs to me,’ said Victoria, in the
terms of that earlier claim which had sometimes made me suspect the
existence of slavery in the Island. The blood of the free-born ought to
have rushed to my face in protest against this attempt to count me as a
chattel; but it did not.
The Captain is knocked down to the schoolmaster; the women hurry away
to light their ovens; the meeting breaks up. Its dispersed groups,
however, form so many subcommittees of reception, for they talk of
nothing but the comfort and delight of the public guests. The only
private interest is represented by the two litigants who have the case
on appeal from a decision of the Island courts to the supreme tribunal
of a British man-of-war. They are tossing with a parti-coloured bean,
to see which shall open the pleadings first.
The Ancient, hurrying down to the landing-place, calls for his
whale-boat and his mariners three, and our navy goes forth in modest
pride to meet the Queen’s ship. She is close in-shore, the depth of
water admitting of a near approach; so, when our Governor boards her,
we see all that passes. His Excellency takes off his hat, and pulls at
a forelock that is not there to pull. No real one has been pulled in
that family since the time of George III., but the gesture has survived
with them as a sign of respect. The Captain shakes hands with him,
and presents him to his officers, who do the same. Then they leave
the clean white deck, flashing light from its polished brasses, and
go below, as though for complimentary refreshments. On their return,
the Governor takes charge of the ship’s cutter, in which our guests
embark. Only a native can dodge the rocks, rocklets, and surf currents
of our bay. They wait at the back of the rollers till the look-out man
ashore waves his hat; then they give way with a will, and are hurled
in, safely, on the crest of the wave.
Two of the officers are old friends of mine. What a little world it is!
You would think all were old friends of the islanders, by the warmth of
welcome. Men, women and children struggle for a grasp of their hands,
and a girl offers flowers to the Captain. He kisses her; his officers
kiss the other girls: fathers, brothers, and cousins hurrah approval,
and content.
Then we lead them to the schoolhouse, by the steep paths, in joyous
procession of old and young. Here the Captain must enter in the Island
register the name of his ship, with other particulars, and meet a
deputation of the elders, who come to trade. The ship wants water,
yams, and potatoes: we want hardware. The terms of exchange are settled
according to a written tariff, and the elders depart, to weigh over
the commodities on their side. They are poor traders, though: yams
are scarce at the moment, yet they ask no higher price for them; nor
can I make them understand that to do so would be to seek an honest
gain. ‘Is there less steel in the hatchets than there used to be,’ they
ask, ‘that we are to give less in yams?’ I remember that the value
of a thing is what it will fetch, and I tell them so, but they shake
their heads. For the first time, it occurs to me that these people have
no natural turn for economic speculation; and that, with all their
religion, they may need a missionary of a kind. A certain finer sense
is wanting; but no more of this just now.
The guests have, meanwhile, been led to their quarters, the Captain
beaming with affability and good nature. He foresees his report to the
Lords of the Admiralty on the morals, manners and customs of these
innocent islanders, with the articles thereon in the daily papers.
It is all such a relief after the official landings of the Pacific
station, and the French polish of the South American dons, much
tarnished by keeping in a torrid clime.
The people are as curious and inquisitive as children. They draw the
officers’ swords, run their fingers along the dulled edges, cry
wonder at the damascened blades. Some of them have never seen the
uniform before: none can ever see it too often. They have the fullest
confidence in the honour of the wearers; and they give themselves
up to enjoyment, without a thought of harm. All the rules governing
their intercourse with traders are suspended. The girls go where they
please, with whom they please: every middy, even, has his feminine
aide-de-camp, and local guide. The Captain is attended by no less
a person than the Ancient himself, though I think he would prefer
to rough it with his officers. The Ancient treats him with a fine
courtesy, affecting not to be master in his own domain.
Nor indeed is he master for the time--at least on the judicial side.
The Queen’s navy, as already stated, is our court of final appeal under
the constitution; and there is that unsettled case. It is called on the
morrow of the Captain’s visit, with the cocoa grove for the seat of the
appellate tribunal. The Ancient offered the schoolhouse, but the Judge
asked why a clearing in the trees would not do as well; and his will
was law. It is quieter than most halls of justice, for the whispers
are lost in the open air. The twitter of the birds overhead is not so
troublesome as an usher’s cry of ‘Silence in Court.’ The gentle breeze
is hardly an inconvenience, for there are no papers to blow about;
and the perfume which it brings from the village gardens would be a
distinct improvement to the atmosphere of Lincoln’s Inn.
I had never quite understood this case, and no wonder, for it had
puzzled all the courts of the Island. A cat had been killed: it opened
in that way, clearly enough, but, soon after, the obscurity began. Who
killed the cat? Even here there was broad daylight--one Elias McCall.
Was he justified in the deed?--Ha! His plea was that the cat had sought
the lives of his chickens, and that, after losing several of these in
successive midnight raids, he had, at length, sought the life of the
cat. The law of the case is perfectly explicit: the cat that slays
fowl shall itself be slain. But the proof of murderous outrage must
be conclusive: the cat must be ‘positively detected in killing’--the
Ancient read the statute from his pocket-book, at the request of the
Court. Now, was the circumstantial evidence so strong as to constitute
detection within the meaning of the Act? The proprietor of the
fledglings, as a truthful man, could say no more than that the cat had
been in the habit of taking up her station near his hen-coop in the
cool of the evening, and that, on the morrow of every such visit, he
had missed one or more birds. He had put two and two together, that was
his expression, and finally, his feelings getting the better of him, he
had ‘let go’ at the cat (the Ancient, at this point, bade him remember
in whose presence he stood), with the result that his brood thereafter
remained intact. On a post-mortem examination, moreover, he had found
a small feather clinging to the fur. Pressed by the other side, he was
bound in honour to admit that he had never seen the cat looking at the
hen-coop--on the contrary, her head was usually turned the other way.
She often sang to herself, as though pre-occupied; and her movements
were so little of a threatening nature that she was washing her face
at the very moment of the fatal stroke. It was not denied that there
were many other cats in the neighbourhood; it was not denied that the
fowls often flew upon the fence where the cat used to sit, nor that
they might there have left the stray feather found on her person. With
this evidence, the owner of the cat left his case in the hands of the
Supreme Court. The courts below had decided against him, the Ancient
first, as Chief Magistrate, and then a jury. Now, the Captain of H.M.S.
‘Rollo’ was asked to give the final award.
That his Honour was troubled was evident by the frequency with which
he asked his assessor, the First Lieutenant, to give him a light
for his cheroot. The ‘positively detected’ of the statute was his
stumbling-block; we could see that with half an eye.
‘Where did you find the feather?’ he said at length, ‘near the tail
end, where the cat might have been sitting?’ It was a leading question,
but no one seemed to notice the irregularity. ‘No, sir,’ returned the
murderer, ‘on her cheek, just under the right whisker.’
‘That settles it, I think,’ said the Judge; ‘she was washing up, after
she had eaten the bird.’ ‘Yes, that settles it,’ echoed the First
Lieutenant. ‘That settles it, of course,’ said the ship’s surgeon,
who, as a mere bystander, had no business to deliver an opinion on the
matter. ‘That settles it,’ said the Ancient; ‘I never thought of asking
the question.’ ‘That settles it,’ said all the villagers present,
including, strange to say, the owner of the cat.--Judgment of the
courts below confirmed.
CHAPTER XII.
THREE DAYS.
Business over, our pleasures begin. They are to stay only three clear
days in all, and we must make the most of them, putting as much into
every precious hour as though it were to be our last of joy.
We visit the ship. She invites us to a party, puts on a little bunting
for the occasion, and fires a gun. Everybody goes. The Captain is
aboard, and makes believe he has never been ashore, shaking hands with
us as we climb the side, though he left us but an hour ago. He wears
his cocked hat and epaulettes, by special request; his officers, too,
have not been sparing of their best. His crew, subdued to the most
mealy-mouthed propriety of speech by such glimpses as they have had of
the Island life, entertain us with a concert. It is the forecastle
fiddle and accordion, with the repertory of the cockney music-halls.
This last seems to lose vitality on our pure uplands, and to gasp
for the breath of its native fen. Our good folk listen to ‘Blow me
up an apple-tree,’ or ‘Did ’em do it, did ’em, did ’em did ’em do?’
believing it must be right, because it is English, yet beginning to
doubt--not us, however, but themselves, beautiful first form of the
doubt of candid souls! Some of the songs are too far away from them
for even the glimmerings of comprehension--the humour of the mere
sordidness of life. ‘Penny paper-collar Joe.’--Well, they wear no
collars; consequently, they make no paper imitations; consequently,
these cost neither a penny nor a pound. For the same reason, ‘O father,
dear father, the brokers are in!’ leaves them stone-cold. ‘What are the
brokers?’ whispers Victoria to me. How curious to have to expound these
elementary things! ‘Hush, Victoria, not now--when they are gone--it
would take all day. Listen to the ballads of the people.’ Next it is a
fantasia of punning effects:
A sloth is not an idol;
A bride can’t wear a bridle,
Though surely by the (h)altar she is led;
Sixpence is not a tanner;
A bridegroom’s not a banner,
Though the banns he will put up before he’s wed.
I tremble: a little more, and the whole secret will be out, of the murk
of mind in which so many of our brethren live, while Lord Tennyson is
at the tailor’s about his ermine, and dilettantism attends its monthly
meeting of the Browning Society, and leaves them in their pen. A little
more, and they may suspect that beauty and taste are all grown for
Mayfair by the Jews, just like the big pine apples, and that the poet
himself is but one more market gardener for the rich. This lyre of the
slums threatens to kill the whole pageant; these sewer gases seem to
tarnish the gold lace on the Captain’s hat.
‘How nice it must be to have your English sense of humour,’ says
Victoria, ‘and to be able to enjoy all these funny things!’
Saved! Once more they have taken the blame upon themselves.
We wander over the ship; admire the cutlasses in their racks; fit
our heads in the muzzle of a big gun, gravely waiting our turn in
file, under the orders of a corporal; eat cake in the Captain’s
cabin, refuse wine; see everything, ask foolish questions everywhere.
Never-to-be-forgotten day! A tar dances a hornpipe for us; three of
our girls dance the rhythmic dance of Tahiti for the tars. The Captain
asks questions about it, and takes notes, always in view of that report
to the Lords of the Admiralty. Some of us are photographed--no, it is
getting too maddeningly gay! The Ancient looks grave, and gives the
signal for departure. The cutters are lowered; the little whaler takes
its freight again; the boats dance us home in the dusk. It is not all
over yet; they send up a rocket and a blue light, to say ‘Good-night,’
as we step ashore. Never-to-be-forgotten day!
And there are more such days to come--days when it is our turn, once
more, to do the honours. Our girls take the distinguished visitors over
the Island--to the cave of the Carvings, the cave of the Watcher, the
Point--tending them carefully on ledge and summit and declivity, as my
nurse tended me. They try to do without such guidance, and come to
grief over it, figuring as meanly as the sinking Cæsar crying for help.
The water sports are just as disheartening. What stoutest man among
us will follow this sea-nymph, in her sea toilette, plunging into the
breakers with a plank in her arms, diving and ducking till she comes to
the far side of the hugest wave, then lying flat on the curling crest,
and rolling in with it, till it breaks in thunder on the rocks? Always,
after the explosion, you look for a mangled body, and you find only a
laughing Venus, rising whole and perfect from the foam.
Nature herself smiles benignly on the festival, and contributes to
it with great sunsets that touch the summits of grove and mountain
with indescribable beauty, and harmonise into perfect peacefulness
of association even the tumult of the breakers in their everlasting
strife with the shore. There are fishings by torchlight, later on, in
the intense shadow of the rocks; above us, the coruscating wall of
rock towering to the moonlit heaven; below, the deep, deep water, all
black and horrible beyond our tiny circle of flame. The cod flock to
the light, like their betters, and get speared with a five-pronged
fork for their pains. The girls, who are deftest at the exercise,
look not unlike Britannia on the halfpenny, as they sit at ease with
their forks, waiting their turn. Now, we paddle out of the shadow into
the silvered sea, and so ashore to the green. Then there is another
concert (ours this time), with simple songs of meeting and of parting,
mostly of the schoolmaster’s writing, quired by the voices of virgins,
and, with such rendering--the scene and the hour also taken into
account--pure intuitions of the deeper significance of life. Impossible
to doubt, after this, that the spirit is to be lord of the house; that
living is the finest of the fine arts, or nothing; and that such is the
message, delivered through Nature, of the Unknowable behind the Nature
veil.
The Ancient is thoughtful all the while, thoughtfullest at the hour
of the breaking-up of this great council of the soul, when the
councillors wander away in pairs, and are lost in the radiant hazes
of the night. It is the last council--to-morrow they go. Our Chief
has led the way to his cottage, and has asked the Captain to step in
on his way home. ‘I wish you gentlemen might never come here,’ he
says pleasantly to his guest, ‘or, if you come, I wish you might never
go away. It is a moment’s pastime for some of you, but, one way or
other, it lasts some of us a lifetime. “Jack ashore”--I’ve heard of
him from my father’s father; but then he goes ashore so often. Our
girls never forget--that’s their nature. I’ve known ’em die, sir, of
these visits of a Queen’s ship. They think it’s only a beginning--your
youngsters think it too, Captain, while the moon shines--I _know_
it’s an ending, for ever and ever. They’ll never meet again, sir, in
this world--although, at this very minute, perhaps, they’re a-cutting
love-knots all over the place to make believe they will.’
The incidental reference to the love-knots seemed to have set him on a
new track of reflection. ‘It’s a pity to spoil the trees for nothing,
all the same,’ he murmured, ‘and, if you’ll excuse the liberty, I think
I’ll just have a look round.’
He stole out to watch the public property; and, by his orders, no
doubt, Victoria, who had lingered in the garden, came in to entertain
the guest. Yet Victoria said not a word. She had been unlike her old
self all the time of their stay; she had become pensive, melancholy,
retiring, joining in none of the diversions, only looking on, or
languidly asking a question now and then. I felt what service she
required of me, and made the talk--no very difficult matter, for the
Captain and I had many acquaintance in common. He knew some of my own
people, besides, and was able to tell me that a young pickle of a
cousin, who had taken to the Navy, had lately joined the ‘Tanis’ for
service on the China station.
‘The “Tanis” was here three years ago,’ said Victoria, very softly, but
looking up at the Captain, I thought, in a rather wistful way.
‘I know she was; I boarded her at Portsmouth, when she went out of
commission. They all talked of nothing but your little Island, and made
me long to come here.’
‘You knew the midshipman of the “Tanis,” perhaps,’ said Victoria, still
with her peculiar ‘inward’ air. ‘Where is he now?’
‘What midshipman?’ the Captain very naturally asked.
If Victoria knew the name, she did not care to give it. ‘He was a tall
young gentleman,’ she said with more animation, yet with a pause to
give the Captain time to collect his thoughts after each item of the
inventory; ‘fair--a quick way of speaking--a pleasant laugh. If you
ever heard him sing, you would be sure to remember him.’ The Captain
shook his head.
‘He fought the battle with the slave-dhow, on the west coast of Africa.’
‘What battle, my dear girl?’
‘_The_ battle,’ she repeated.
‘Do you mean he was in a boat that ran down one of those rascally
traders? We do that every day.’
‘He won the battle, that’s all I know,’ said Victoria. ‘He told me
so. I believe they called him “Curly” in the mess, because they were
jealous of his hair,’ she added, blushing to find herself forced into
these particulars, but determined to have him recognised.
‘Curly,’ mused the Captain, doing his very best--‘can’t say I know the
name.’
‘He wore a dirk to fight with,’ said Victoria.
‘They all wear dirks,’ returned the Captain.
‘His laugh was so pleasant!’ She was repeating herself beyond question,
but, perhaps, it was only to give the Captain one more chance.
‘No doubt, no doubt!’
‘Yet some liked his smile better.’
‘Some like one thing, some another,’ said the Captain--feebly, I
thought, but he was hard pressed.
‘I suppose they all wear buttons like this?’ she said, producing the
uncouth ornament from her neck.
‘Yes, one middy’s button’s like another middy’s button, you know;
that’s the worst of it,’ said the Captain; ‘and it’s just the same
with their dirks and their heads of hair. They seem to turn all the
young dogs out of one mould. I think they ought to be stamped for
identification.’
Victoria withdrew into the shade of the room.
The next morning was the last morning; yet who would have guessed it?
It began just as the others had begun, with early wanderings on the
breezy hills, with laughter, with the giving and taking of tokens. It
went on like the other mornings, only now the ship had landed the last
of our simple stores, and her boat was waiting to take her people off.
She was to fire a Royal Salute, as she left us, by particular request,
and to hoist the Royal Standard, and man the yards. The girls seemed
merrier than ever at the prospect of it. The Captain, at the head of
his officers, stood at the landing-stage; the Ancient faced him, with
his smiling subjects in the rear. There was but one more ceremony,
and it was accomplished when the two grasped hands, as the boat, now
freighted with our departing guests, with one strong shove, left the
shores of the Island.
Then, for a truth, the womankind seemed to feel that it was parting,
and a cry went up from them as blood-curdling as a cry of ‘Murder!’
heard in the night. It was the fatal gift of intensity in extremes
common to these southern natures. The place of gladness was, in a
moment, turned into the place of grief; they threw themselves on the
ground, and bit their dishevelled hair; they stretched supplicating
hands towards the boat. It was a tropic storm of woe. Never had I
seen such utter abandonment of the very hope of hope. It made one
sick to think of the pain there is in the world--the pain that clings
like a shadow to every joy, and that sets its seal on every decisive
fact of being, from birth to death, on the going out, equally with
the coming in, as though to forbid all false comfort in the belief of
mere alternation. For alternation there is not; with a wail begins the
dismal account of human experience, and with a groan it ends, whatever
may come between. Poor wretches! bloated out of all beauty with the
water of their tears, I could have killed them as they grovelled there,
for very rage of pity. Anything to stop these dreary sequences of
sorrow. The three days of beatitude are past; and, for the promise of
all the coming years, listen to the Ancient as he turns away:
‘Never again with thee, Robin!
Never again by the light of the moon.’
CHAPTER XIII.
A MISSION.
A deep melancholy, an extreme lassitude follow our great bereavement.
’Tis as though Death had passed over us, and his lingering shadow still
blighted the sunlight of the Isle. We turned to work again, but, at
first, only like automaton figures. There is the action of labour,
but little effect. We eat and drink in much the same mechanical way.
A bird’s-eye view of us would suggest something in waxwork on a grand
scale. Our talk is depressing as a demonstration on the phonograph, the
topics indifferent, the tones a mere resurrection of the voice. No one
speaks of the ship that is dead and gone.
Victoria, whose personal share in the common sorrow can be but small,
seems to grieve as much as any of us. I am not allowed to be with
her now--rather I see she does not want me, and I keep away. When she
starts for the Peak, I start for the Watcher’s Cave, and we pine on
opposite heights. Her simple household duties done, she will disappear
for the whole day. I pass a good deal of time in the Ancient’s library,
reading yellow British classics, out of the old scuttled ship. They are
interleaved with book-marks, each a delicate feminine finger beckoning
to a place of refreshment and rest. It is a question of time and
season, and perhaps Victoria herself will tell me when to speak.
But I tire of waiting at last, the sooner because, till now, she has
shared all her thoughts with me; and, one day, I track her to a silent
shelter of woods south of the ridge. She lies in the high grass,
picking a flower to pieces, but otherwise quite still.
‘Victoria.’
‘Ah! thinking of you has brought you,’ she says, turning her head with
no surprise.
‘How could I know you wanted me?’
‘I did not know it myself till to-day.’
‘Why must _you_ suffer, Victoria?’
‘I do not suffer at all as you think; but they do; anyone can see that.’
‘Well, that is their concern, or, at most, your father’s. You are not
Governor of the Island.’
‘I am the Governor’s daughter,’ she said, in another tone. ‘And what
can my father do? What can anyone do, but you, perhaps? You must help
us. Only you _can_ help us. We are a poor lost people, without you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This sorrow----’
‘Will pass in a week. Let it run its course.’
‘I do not want it to pass like that, to die of mere numbness. So much
else will die along with it, if it does.’
‘Fight it down.’
‘No, no, no! What a bludgeon man you are! You must be killing
something. And you can’t kill a sorrow or a weakness by what you call
fighting it. Perhaps it will kill you instead. I know; do you think I
have never had to try? Now listen to what I say. Whenever you are weak,
or whenever you are bad, you are not to go into battle with your own
heart and twang off little texts at it. Heart will put on its casing,
and turn the points of the texts; or, perhaps, twang back at you, and
you will both be wounded and worried, that’s all. And, if you win, you
have either a corpse before you, or a slave, and there’s a nice union
till death do us part!’
‘You are to run away, perhaps. Is that your woman’s science of war?’
‘Oh, now we have heard the mocking bird on the Island!’ she said, in
grave rebuke. ‘But that is just it; you are to run away, but always
to higher ground. Leave your weakness and your badness alone, and try
for goodness, that is all. Don’t waste yourself in the marshes; the
mountain is the best place. An old man who had lived in India with the
priests told me that, and I gave him some yams for it. He was cook to a
whaler. Yet you say we don’t know how to trade.’
‘But what has all this to do with my healing powers? That is what
puzzles me.’
‘Lead us to the higher ground,’ she said, laying her hand on my arm.
‘What _do_ you mean?’
‘Civilise us. Make us like England. Give us larger things to live for.
Tell us what we must do. There must be something wanting, but I cannot
tell what it is. It all seems so beautiful here--the shining sun,
friends to love, peace, the singing, the sea, the very wind in this
wood! Yet I know there must be something. That is why the Queen’s ships
never come again. We are like children, perhaps.’
‘Keep so.’
‘No, no, we want to be like you. This is babyland. Make us great and
good. You know the secret: you have lived _there_.’
‘What am I to do?’
‘Speak to father. Father will speak to the people. He does not see it
as I do, but you can open his eyes. Then we’ll have a meeting, and
begin to be like England at once.’
It was inviting, no doubt: to be a Moses of the Pacific, and to shape a
nation! Perhaps they _are_ in a bad way, if one comes to think of it.
I remember that test case of the barter of the yams. It seemed nothing
in passing; it is everything, if you look at it in the proper light.
What poverty of spirit! they cannot so much as dispose of a vegetable
on first principles. They have no principles at all, only beautiful
emotions; no science of life; at best, but an unconscious art. Upon
my word, they live like so many lilies of the field, not even like
orchids, which, in a general way, are at least brought up. They are
a mere flowery mead of humanity. By the time I have brought them to
this state, in swift meditation, I myself might be a Scotch landscape
gardener, for my yearning to lay them out in walks.
‘Very well, Victoria; anything to make you happy--you and yours. You
wish to have your people civilised?’
Her smile was answer enough.
‘I must warn you beforehand: it hurts.’
‘How else could we expect it to do us good?’
‘Sometimes you will think me your worst enemy.’
‘O! be still! when will you speak to father?’
‘To-night. But you must take care to keep us to ourselves--us three. We
want no outsiders.’
‘I will take care.’
‘Now go, dear child, and leave me alone to work it out.’
She had gradually lowered her voice, as though to lull me to rest
in a blessed promise and a blessed resolve. Now she ceased speaking
altogether, and only looked ineffable gratitude and hope, as she stole
away softly through the long grass.
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 cheerily when 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 grocer likes, 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 remember that, 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 superfluity to 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, with the 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 wrought in 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 the _serviette_ of 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 splendour that 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 true _modus vivendi_ between 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 are _you_ in
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 little nearer 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 by sowing 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.
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, cast a wistful gaze over the
settlement. ‘I suppose it _would_ change 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 easily be 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 cuts things 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 their little
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 which _is_ the 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 for them. 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 how they 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 human life 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 7_s._ 6_d._ 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 on the
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 Exchange steps,
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.
CHAPTER XVI.
A DECLARATION.
‘When are we to begin the alterations?’ said the girl.
‘Not yet, my Victoria! No, not yet! Let all things stay as they are,
and let me stay with them, here by your side. Beautiful, perfect
creature! Let me speak what must be spoken: I love you!’
A moment before I had no thought that these words would ever pass my
lips. They were almost as much of a shock to me as to the girl. It
had been my secret; or shall I say that it was almost a secret to me?
Exquisite charm! In my calmer moments, I should have hated the thought
of ever tearing this tender veil of mystery and reserve, behind which
all that is sweetest in emotion dwells. To be able to love her as at
first one loves the light, without analysis, was the most stimulating
of joys; to have it all set down in quantitative inventory of vows, and
bonds, and declarations, might be quite another thing. Now, my heart
was naked to her gaze, and I stood silent with a sort of shame.
She, too, was silent. She had taken her hand from mine, and clasped
it in the other, behind her, just as on the day of our first meeting;
and there she stood, erect, contemplative, almost on the same spot.
The feet were drawn together, the head was thrown back; it was her
characteristic attitude for emergencies. So had I seen her first, the
beautiful piece of life, the divine animal, flawless in health and
strength and freshness as a Venus of the Louvre, yet all touched with
spiritual loveliness by the great eyes--fierce now, as I feared--and by
the heaving breast.
‘I cannot help it,’ I said, with a sort of sullen passion. ‘I felt so
sure that I could keep this thing back that I set no guard over myself.
Since it is out, take the truth. Whatever comes of it, we can never be
the same to each other again.’
‘We must be the same,’ she said, with all the deep liquid softness in
her voice, that was missing from her gaze. ‘Oh! I knew this would come
one day, I knew it would. And I did nothing to prevent it. The fault is
all mine.’
‘The fault?’
‘I am the wretchedest woman that ever lived,’ sobbed Victoria, suddenly
sinking to the ground in a passion of tears, and beating it, in the
wild despairing way of her sister-savages, when the boat took their
sweethearts away--statue no longer, but very flesh and blood in every
quivering nerve.
I did not try to raise her, I did not stir. In a few moments, when
the paroxysm had passed, she raised herself, and then came, in the
tenderest way, and took my hand, and looked straight into my eyes, this
time, through the blessed dews that dimmed her own.
‘You must know it. Some one else loves me. The word has been spoken. I
am promised. Come with me--but never tell a living soul! Then, I should
die.’
She led me swiftly to a small grove of wild trees, nestling in a dip
of the rock, and thin and poor, for they saw neither the eastern nor
the western sun. And, plunging into it, her hand still holding mine,
then climbing again, after the sharp descent, she stopped before a
dwarf-tree, where the Ancient would never have thought of looking for
any infraction of his forest laws. A rude monogram was carved on the
tree, with a date and two crosses.
‘We cut them together on our last day,’ said the girl, laying her
finger on one of the crosses, ‘and this was mine. This was cut from
his coat the same day,’ and she drew the wretched old navy-button from
its nest in her pure bosom. ‘Now you know all. I am promised; and if I
forget it, how can I ever say my prayers again?’
The monogram was V.A., and the A., I suppose, was the baptismal initial
of the mysterious Curly, who won the great battle with the slave-dhow,
and whose laugh and smile divided the honours of admiration with
mankind. Victoria’s poor secret was hardly worth the telling, for, of
course, I had guessed it long before. But what I had not guessed was
this fidelity of daily, hourly remembrance to the vanished hero of a
vanished ship--now, perhaps, firing her guns of joyous salutation in
some haven on the other side of the world.
Did I hint this to the beautiful devotee? Not I! One moment of
temptation came, but it passed; and I was spared the meanness of
tormenting her with a doubt. Since Curly was her religion, let him be
her religion still. Here was his shrine. It was hung all about with
strange little memorials of him that looked like aids to worship,
votive offerings of bits of ribbon on the branches of his sacred
tree. A necklace of shells, fastened in its place with pins, formed a
border in alto-relievo for the monogram and the date. In due course,
no doubt, there would be an altar for the navy-button and a temple for
the altar--so such things grow. I remembered what the girl had told me
of the old strain of idolatry in her blood. Yet truth and love are so
entrancing to the gaze that, in regarding them, the real amateur soon
loses all thought of self. The picture in this virgin’s soul was a
master-piece, not to be marred by a touch--Curly in his orisons, ever
praying with his face towards the Isle; seas and continents between
them, yet the electric thread of sympathy only the longer on that
account.
All this I fancied forth, and, as usual, in that kind of snap-shooting
at truth, I could not be quite sure of my mark. With all her hope and
trust in Curly, Victoria seemed full of a strange disquiet about him,
not easy to explain.
‘Five ships here since he left,’ she said, ‘and no word or token from
him--not so much as one of these,’ and she returned the button to her
breast. ‘The black people have killed him, perhaps. Every night and
every morning this last month I have come here to ask for a sign of
him, living or dead. You remember that night I saw the shape on the
Ridge: I half fancied--that was why I was so afraid; just because I was
with you. Have I done anything wrong? Have I done wrong? Nobody helps
me. I seem to stand all alone.’
‘Victoria, if you talk like that, I must tell you that I am by your
side.’
‘Dear, good friend, yes, I seem to be forgetting you. Why is it so hard
to do right? Why is our choice always between pain and pain?’
‘You shall not choose, princess; I will choose for you. Be my comrade,
and only that. I will ask for no more. As for me, let me be to you what
I like, what is best for me. All wisdom is in loving you, and I want
to be wise. If I must not speak to you, let me spend precious hours
by your side, looking, learning, for your eyes light for me the dark
places of the world.’
‘Comrades then,’ she said, smiling; and she gave me her hand.
CHAPTER XVII.
A MEDITATION.
So now, I think, I begin to see why I have been sent here--not to give
lessons, but to take them. My education has been neglected, and I am
coaching for a pass in the higher learning of life. I am reading with
Victoria--reading in the deep eyes, without book. It is a course of
social economy by a new method. The method is to look on this image
of the Divine, as intently as may be without being caught in the
act. I must not be caught; half of the gusty anger of the gods with
adoring mortals comes of their dislike of being stared at. And, besides
looking, there must be listening--listening with the heart. The ear
will not do; the true message of this exquisite piece of being is only
for a finer organ. Put a microphone in a cave, and it will register the
beat of the earth’s breathing: with a still more delicate instrument,
perhaps, this girl’s elemental nature, at its stillest, will be heard
to speak. As soon as my heart was stirred, then truly she began to be
audible to me--blessed day!
And to give me delight, as well as profit, she has not the faintest
idea of her function. Often I get the benefit of a whole morning’s
lecture, requiring copious notes, while, for all she knows of it, I
have but watched her as she manœuvred a battalion of fowls.
A grand provision of leisure for the true work of life seems to be
her chief instinctive aim. She has the genius of indifference to
trivial things; she is never busy with aught that does not truly
count. The idleness of hurry is unknown to her; she is always free for
essentials--a true word, a noble action, a great thought.
But this is lover’s talk. I cannot help that; lover’s talk let it be,
so only she cannot overhear.
I am a true lover in this, that the things she says to me are as
nothing to the things she seems to say. I do not want her to say much.
I can say for her all I most want to hear. She idealises the world
for me. She is a sublime suggestion. She only starts the game; I play.
Worship is in the worshipper. She brings out my highest, truest, best.
A something is within me; she is its mystical correspondence in warm
life. She seems to speak things to me, she seems to be things to me.
Are these things true of her? What care I: they are true of me!
So, then, for me, she is a great artist in being. She lives to beauty,
the sole end. She does naught only for the thing done; there is also
the way of doing it. I note her placid disdain of a certain hen, that
has an absurd habit of hatching by quantity, and addles half the
brood. The other half, for want of due maternal care, are a species of
bush-fowl that have lost their way in civilisation, and Victoria spends
days over their bags of bone and feathers, to bring them into harmony
with her great law. I am sure she thinks, though she might never know
how to say it, that every problem of being is, in the profoundest
sense, a problem of manner. _How_ do you love, hate, suffer, and
rejoice; nay, how do you eat and drink? There are higher proprieties,
even in this art, than the management of peas with the fork. Is it
after the manner of the farm-yard, or after the other? I remember her
little touch about the pasturing brutes. The brutes, too, renounce, but
not as a fine art. It is only their ‘needs must when the devil drives.’
That was her meaning. They only do without; man _gives up_, because man
alone is the artist, and art is choice. Living or dying, how slight as
ends in themselves! but how you live, how you die! Is the piece well
acted, or have you but got through your part? Who wants it, merely as
a part got through? Not that greater than Theseus, for certain, before
whom this dream-play is played.
That picture of the old life troubled me so, that grand composition of
the Exchange steps. It would not come right. Here is one whose mere
presence brings everything into its place. Let her but stand beside
the easel, and I get the key at once. Now I see where it was wrong;
now could I go among the rushing, blurred figures of my sitters, and
ask them, for the love of God, and, still more, for the love of man,
to keep still. I could say to them, as at her bidding, ‘Piano! piano!
you are perishing of over strain. You, the higher up, why this frantic
scraping for useless currency? What can it do for you? How much of
peace comes out of it, how much of fineness of life? What are you when
all is done--when you have sat at meat with my Lord, and added the
Hall in the country to the mansion in town? Have you yet found out the
faintest inner meaning of one of the pictures on your wall, of one of
the books on your shelf? You think Walter Map is for monkish Latin,
and that other’s vision of “all the wealth of this world, and the woe,
both” merely for a scholar’s treat. _Malheureux!_ rushing away to your
daily drive for more canvases, more bindings, more horses of swiftness,
more furniture, in a word, and more dinners of the stalled ox. The
greed makes the hurry, and the wasteful idle hurry spoils the life.
Oh, the grim set of your jaws, the thinly veiled hardness of your eye,
even at the sacred hour of rest and relaxation! What are you but a huge
river-pike in black and white! More leisure, friend, less lust of gear.
Cut away the hindrances to living, and begin to live. Take nothing
in but what you can digest to true use, which is beauty of life. What
a scandal, if you were caught and opened in an unguarded hour, and
half your stomach were found lined with vanities as profitless as the
bits of shoe leather and old corks so often found in the maw of your
prototype--vanities of things bolted to the end of bolting, titles of
park and meadow where _you_ can never find a flower, visiting-lists
where you can never find a friend, cards for music where you may never
hear a note that breathes one of the secrets of Heaven. Your bolting
for waste takes so much out of the common stock for use. Your grab for
superfluity baulks so much honest craving for need!’
You work for it! Will no one deliver us from the tyranny of that cry?
Work for what?--to have and to hold, to leave less and less for the
weaker, till finally, in the lowest hell of it, the huge crowd of the
uncanny have to learn to call their base scramble for your leavings the
battle of life? More leisure for these, from the obsession of the one
degrading thought--how to get the dry crust and the cold potato for
the day’s meal. For, true living begins only when such things are done
with, when the belly is timbered with victual, and the back clothed,
and when the spirit, that is the all-in-all, is left free for its
shaping work. More leisure for love and friendship, and kindly deeds,
and joy--the true business, which, if we were not blinded, would have
their banks and their depôts, and their pushing agents in every street.
The real ‘Theory of Exchanges,’ what is it but the philosophy of the
diffusion of the humane self? Oh, the hard world of the self-helpers,
with their Smiling apostle! oh, the hard world!--the hard world of
all the workers, high and low, leisureless for profitable toil, the
real task hardly so much as begun--too hard even for the very martyrs,
robbed of their right to smile in the death-hour, by the horrid fear
that all eternity will never set the muddle straight! Jesus, what a
sight! the sight of the factories, right through, from the tiniest
monkey-faced minder, up to the gaudy boss-bird in his mahogany cage.
This organised labour? fie! oh fie! Organised? for what? for the sake
of the labour, or for the sake of the labourer--the only product that
really counts--for the sake of the cottons, or for the sake of the
garment-stuff for the souls of men? Is labour man’s end, or his means?
his master, or his ministrant? Surely the first true end of making
cottons well is to make the maker better. And, if one must be spoiled
in the process, for Heaven’s sake let it be the cottons, though, of
that, no need. Every thread of their fineness must come out of some
inner fineness in him. How pathetically absurd to have them smooth,
and white, and close-textured, and firm in the pull, and him coarse,
foul, loose-minded, tearing in the Devil’s hand under any strain of
lust or rage! But why insist on a commonplace when all the wisest feel
that truth, and speak it now? The work exists for the worker; let us
never cease to proclaim it, and have done with the old lie--the worker
for the work. How sad the sight when you pass from one to the other!
The expectation born naturally of the fine thing is always of some
finer animate thing behind. Hence the craving for sight and knowledge
of heroes. But see the slop-made piece of human handiwork that skulks
as maker, behind the screen of drawing-room intrigue, or behind my
lady’s fan--shabby, shambling, beer-bedewed, only so much of him washed
as might soil the satins and brocades he shapes for others’ uses! Go
into the dismal slums that manufacture for Mayfair, and follow the
dainty casket for jewels from one end to the other of the line--from
the rickety workshop, airless, and only not lightless, too, because
the light is wanted for the labour, to the still daintier casket for
men and women, in which it finds its cushioned rest. If this beautiful
correspondence, why that grotesque incongruity? If these who touch it
as owners are as fine as itself, why not, also, they who touch it as
makers, at least with the inner fineness, and a certain amplitude of
material life? But no: a dozen have died to all the true ends of being
to make that pretty toy, have been reared in the belief that all the
fineness they have is to go into that direct, and not, in the first
place, into their own lives.
For nothing sanctifies a wrong, not even a headache in doing it; and
‘honest industry,’ which makes of patience and thrift but the foothold
for its spring upon the back of stupidity or improvidence, is the
sinfullest sin of all. Be not so sanctified of air, O new hot-gospeller
of work! Your sole right over knaves and fools is but the right to help
them to better wisdom out of your heart and hand. Your virtue was not
given to you for investment at forty per cent. The knaves and fools are
diseased--that is all; and you, when you stoop to personal profit out
of their infirmity, are worse diseased than they. A terrible malady,
yours, of hard work to self-regarding ends; infectious to the last
degree; a sort of dry rot of life.
Believe this--individualism, self-help, to any other end than the help
of all, is the great untruth. Believe it, in spite of the Smiling
apostle, who has done more harm with the nostrum of his title than
Abernethy with his invention of blue-pill. Go on being self-helpful,
if you must, for thirty, forty centuries more; only not for ever! Take
a lease of five times nine hundred and ninety-nine years, yet fix some
term! Give us a little hope, and name the happy day when the freehold
of light and life and jouissance shall revert to all.
Try the other thing as a regimen, once in a way, as a new diet for your
soul’s health--as a new quack medicine, then, powerfully recommended
by a sufferer: will that appeal? One poor little pill--it cannot hurt
overmuch. Cut off some of the work that ministers but to your ease
and luxury, and that, with interest piled on interest of infamous
wrong, makes the ever-growing load of sorrow for the mass. Cease to be
competitive and self-helping, at least in precious moments when you
feel your heart sick. Go back to it, if you will, if you can, when you
feel a man again, as convalescents resume their mulligatawny and hot
lobster when the plainer roast and boiled have set them right. Treat
your mind like a stomach, and give it a touch of nature once in a
while. Then, if you have a taste that way, still return for your gorge
at the banquet of work. Only, try to include in it some concern for the
most truly helpless, the stupid and the base, and to find the relish in
the end rather than the means. For the end is not to make riches of
mind, body, or estate for yourself, but to lift up life for one and for
all.
This is how I interpret Victoria. This is what I think she means. Let
me put it to the proof.
CHAPTER XVIII.
A LORD OF INDIA.
I have to tell her one day of the Empire, the power, the stretch of
it, the count in millions of miles, in millions of souls; the largest
empires, living or dead, mostly but parishes beside hers and mine. In
mere size, Russia, even, beaten by an eighth, the Grand Republic beaten
all but three times over, the late Darius the Great beaten five times
clear--more than forty Germanys, more than fifty Spains! Our own Mother
Island but a dot in a waste beside it, Victoria’s Island but a dot on
the dot, the parasite of a midge. With this, the figures for commerce,
the figures for sails on all the seas that wash the ball, the figures
for wealth--a round nine thousand millions sterling, if we were sold
up to-morrow, and, for all the bad years since ‘seventy-five, a steady
hundred and eighty millions added year by year to the hoard--our
swelling liver almost putrid with the gorge of gold.
Victoria is delighted; wants to measure Pitcairn with her sash--is
stopped; becomes light of heart, effusive; carolleth; offers to take me
to the Cave on the ledge, for a treat--the Cave of the Great Scrape,
I have always called it--pays me a sort of reverence, as one who has
come from the sun of this colossal system--is stopped again. Then,
after purring foolishly over the totals, like a great happy kitten
that has got all the thread in the world for a ball, asks to have them
unravelled in measured inventory. Is told something about Australia,
about Canada, about the Indies. Seems to see it all with ever-dilating
pupils, as a child before a pageant of pantomime. Sees it in procession
of countless tribes, armies, emblemed industries, brother peoples,
subject kings; warriors coated in mail, in crimson, or only in the
black of their own skins; priests bearing every symbol, from the
notched stick to the cross; mechanics, from them that smooth with the
flint hatchet to them that smooth with the Whitworth plane; Nature’s
experiments with the type, from the bushman to the man from Mayfair. At
this, and long before the procession closes, shows signs of worshipping
me again, as a sort of deputy lord of India and the other dependencies
in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. But I turn away.
For modesty forbids, not to speak of the fear of detection. All the
lords of India are not so plump; and I sometimes wonder what the
lordship means. I am a lord of India, it is true, but so is Snip there,
in his sweating-shop, and Swart carrying the sandwich-board, ‘lords
of human kind,’ as it was once put; but let us keep within bounds. I
think of the lordship whenever I meet Swart, whenever I take stock of
all the figures that make the huge stain of shabbiness upon our moving
crowds. A lord of India, too, the man in threadbare who turns out every
morning from Kentish Town or Somers, or other of the circumjacent
wastes, to look for a job in the City, plodding steadily forward for
the hundredth time, with fifteen shillings a week as the goal of hope.
Clean shaven this lord, got up for ‘respectable appearance,’ down to
his last ha’penny, in shining boots, inked for the cracks and patches,
and shining coat; everything shining about him, but the hard and
hopeless face. He is certainly of the Imperial breed--no one can deny
him that--a lord of India, an heir to the ages of struggle and victory
on battle plains dotting our fifth of the globe.
But Swart is the best example, and Victoria is easily stimulated to the
entreaty that I will tell of him all I know. It is worth telling, in
good faith.
‘I first met Swart in Regent Street, a little while before I came out
here. He was sandwiched between two boards of “India in London,” and
there was something so spiritually picturesque in the ruin of him, from
his baggy hat to his mere suggestion of a boot, that it drew me to his
side. I was drawn by curiosity rather than by pity, as a naturalist who
might want to see how the wood-louse lives.’
‘Where is Regent Street? and what is a sandwich-man?’ said Victoria as
I began the tale.
‘We must reserve all that for the footnotes. If I am to keep on
moving, you must let me get under way.’
‘Well, we struck up acquaintance, Swart and I. Did I say that he was
tallish, thin, bent, and grizzled, and foul? I want to get all that
over as soon as may be. Sixty, or thereabouts, I should say, as to
age; a not unkindly face, and not unhandsome, but for its furrows and
puckers of mean cares--a good face spoiled.’
‘I wish I knew what a sandwich-man is,’ she murmured; ‘but it does not
signify. Please go on.’
‘We struck up acquaintance, and I used to walk with him up and down
his beat--he in the gutter, I on the kerb. He had been a soldier, and
had helped to win India back for England at the storming of Lucknow.
He was quite proud of the whole achievement, and of his share in
it. “They was nigh slipping clean away, sir,” he would say of his
Indian fellow-subjects. “You cannot think how nigh they was; but we
just cotched ’em by the tail.” It was pleasant to see Swart proud
of anything; it did so much to improve his air. At such moments, he
seemed almost a man. They were but sun-rifts in a black sky, of
course. Sometimes the policeman would threaten to run him in, for
trespassing on the kerb with the edge of his board. This would tend
to drive him wide of the gutter; then, his foreman would come by,
and growl an oath at him for not walking straight in his furrow, and
threaten him with the sack.’
‘“The sack!”’ said Victoria softly; ‘“run him in!” I am not
interrupting, you know, I am only saving up.’
‘I asked Swart to let me go and see him, but he said “Not yet.” He was
living in a common lodging-house, and he was not allowed to receive
visitors. “If I was allowed,” he said frankly, “I shouldn’t like you
to come. They really ain’t fit company for a gentleman, or, for that
matter, for a common man. We had three took out of their beds last
night for robberies from the person, and one for burglary and murder.
What with the police coming in and out of the room, and flashing their
lights on your faces, there was no getting a wink. There was sixty
sleepin’ in our room, and the row woke most of us up. You may fancy
what it was after that. Besides, I’m gettin’ too old to fight for my
place by the kitchen fire, and I’m cold half the time. Then, if you
ain’t got your fourpence every night, out you go; and I can’t tackle
the Embankment no more. I want a place of my own.”’
‘You might tell me about the Embankment now,’ she said, ‘but, of
course, we’ll make a note of it, if you are going to get cross.’
‘It is an open thoroughfare, the finest in London, bordered, on one
side, by gardens and public palaces, on the other, by the river. The
people who cannot afford to sleep as Swart sleeps are allowed to sleep
there, as a favour, for it is against the law.’
‘But do you mean to say----?’
‘Yes, indeed, I do; that is just what I do mean.’
‘But how _can_ the others go to bed, then?’
‘Well, how can you, for that matter, now you know it? You get used to
such things.’
‘I would never go to bed if I lived there. Never, at least, till----?’
‘A week or two later Swart told me that his place was ready, and that
I might call. He had been saving slowly for his furnishing, for, as
he observed, what can you do on 1_s._ 3_d._ a day? He merely “had his
eye” on a table. I let him keep his eye on it. The experiment was too
interesting to be spoiled by help from me.
‘His place was in White Horse Yard. White Horse Yard, you must know,
Victoria, is a London slum, one of hundreds as clearly marked on the
map, and as well known, as Buckingham Palace or Grosvenor Square.
The description would interest you, as a semi-savage, but to us worn
children of civilisation it is too trite for pleasure or profit. Every
social reformer begins by describing White Horse Yard: it is the
sign of the “’prentice hand.” Swart’s place was reached by a narrow
causeway, reeking with every kind of abomination, and by a staircase,
dark and rotten, and swarming with vermin, as I had afterwards good
reason to know. Here, at the summit, was his back garret, with his bed
of shavings, and his table, made of a packing-case turned upside down.
His neighbours worked at many trades, including that most ancient one
of private plunder. The front garret was the home, as distinct from
the place of business, of “one of them gals.” Swart could never be
induced to be more explicit. On the floor below, they made lawn-tennis
aprons at threepence a dozen, and army coats. They did something with
rabbit-skins in the back drawing-room, for, one day, when Swart opened
his window for air, we were nearly choked with a furry adulteration of
the precious fluid that came in with the fog. A housebreaker who had
been out of work for six months or more, owing to an injury received in
a scuffle with a policeman, occupied the front kitchen, and, by general
consent, he was the quietest man in the house. The back kitchen--but
no, nothing of these premises below the ground level, if you please;
nothing, even in distant allusion, in veiled hint; nothing about the
back yard either, or about the water-butt therein! If you are going to
be foolish, Victoria, I shall just leave off.’
‘I am not foolish.’
‘What are you crying about?’
‘If we let people live so, we should be afraid of God; I think we
should be afraid of every thunderstorm.’
‘The lightning is very tender with us--a chimney-stack now and then;
seldom the steeple of a church.’
‘It is not true. You are just saying things to me. There are missions
in all the cities to look after the poor people. I have read books.’
‘Of course. There were four missions in this very circumscription of
Swart’s, and one Inspector of Public Health.
‘The chief thing the missionaries preached was the sanctity of
submission, or that sanctity of property which had made this dismal
hole what it was. They preached it in a pair of parlours, only less
dismal than Swart’s garret. Their object was to effect a change of
heart as a condition precedent to the change of linen--the cart before
the horse. Of the night of material ugliness around that was, on one
side, the parent of all this spiritual ugliness, they seemed to have
no idea. On Sunday, some of the poor people in the yard went to the
preaching, dubiously, yet still hoping there might be something in it,
their dim intuitions of logic being hardly strong enough to expose
the mockery of its gospel of love. Others went to the drink-shops,
and they were the wiser, for they found a little brightness there.
There was one drink-shop to every two hundred inhabitants; and the
missionaries, who were quite as dull as their hearers, never understood
the reason why.
‘Swart read his paper meanwhile, and joined the crowd in the “pub,”
when he had a penny to spare. He never missed his paper, being quite
a hopeful kind of fool, and inclined to believe that the better luck
was just going to begin. He had revelled in that anticipation, from
Sunday to Sunday, for at least five-and-thirty years. The foreign
intelligence, especially, used to cheer his soul. We were always taking
something to round our Empire off; soon it would be quite trim, and
then! “You may reckon we’ve got Burmah, sir,” he said to me one day,
when news came of the execution of a fresh batch of dacoits. “It’s
as good as ours. There’ll be fine times, I’m thinking, soon. Such a
rumpus, indeed, when it’s all for their good!” He was really angry with
the Burmese. He regarded their war, and all the other little wars, as
only so many accidents of human perversity that tended to defer the
grand opening of a vast humanitarian entertainment known as “Better
times all round.” He had hoped the curtain was going to rise, when
India was quieted down, in the pit. Then came the stupid interruptions
from the Abyssinian and Ashantee sections of the gallery. Then the
Afghan and Zulu fights at the doors. Next, “them there fellers in the
Soudan.” Now, “the Burmah lot.” Swart had been waiting through all this
for a curtain that never stirred.’
‘The curtain is to hide the stage when they are changing the scenery,’
she said, wandering from the subject for a moment, like the big child
she was. ‘It is let down five times in most of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays.
I know.’
‘Yes, you know, Vickey, and so did Swart. Swart was just the man for
that kind of stage-play, being one of those profounder fools who take
everything as it is offered to them, and who will very contentedly
accept two deal boards and a sheet of canvas for a blossoming tree.
They had told him that he, too, was a lord of India, and he believed
it; and he was quite touched, as with the sense of an accession of
personal dignity, when his Sovereign was made Empress as well as
Queen. As he would often observe, all the people in his court were
lords of India, if they only knew it, heirs to the Great Mogul--for he
had a smattering of history--conquerors at Plassey, Mooltan, Moodkee,
Sobraon, and the rest. All Clare Market and Collier’s Rents, and all
the Minories had their share in that great heritage, yet they never
gave it a thought.
‘They could not be got to see it in that way, there was the difficulty.
Swart had endless arguments with them on the calm Sabbath afternoons,
while they waited at the street corners, ankle deep in slush, for the
opening of the houses. He would hurl his figures at their heads; totals
for imports and exports, the growth in shipping, the growth in trade.
There was sometimes an inert obstructive force in their stupidity
against which he could not prevail. The brighter witted mocked him
openly, and always led the argument back from the pageant of Empire to
his own rags. The duller merely spat, but there was dissent in their
expectoration; and sometimes he was obliged to fancy they spat at him.
He would ask me for help in his strait, and I lent him some of the
popular literature of Federation, where the right arguments are all set
down.’
‘We have begun praying for Federation, every Sunday--just after the
Collect. The schoolmaster is writing a Federation hymn.’
‘Try to interrupt me as little as you can, my dear. It checks the flow.
Make notes, and we’ll settle it up afterwards.’ (She took off her
girdle and tied a knot for ‘Federation.’)
‘But I felt less interest in Swart’s dealings with others than in his
dealings with himself. That was the ever-present wonder. I found, on
probing his wound of penury, that he had been waiting for relief, not
for five-and-thirty years merely, but, in a sense, for five hundred.
He was of a most ancient stock, as indeed are most of us, if you will
but think of it; and for all the years it had flourished on this earth,
in so far as the straining vision could trace it through the night
of time, that stock had never escaped from its parent dunghill. And
Swart’s gaze carried back very far. For a man of his class, he had
a quite exceptional knowledge of family history, partly oral, partly
recorded on the fly-leaf of a family Bible, which, for the purpose of
our researches, I lent him the money to get out of pawn.’ (She tied
another knot at ‘pawn.’)
‘The Swarts knew themselves as far back as Anne; nay, with allowances
and conjectural emendations, as far back as the second Charles. Here,
then, was my opportunity, unique, as far as I know, to get at a real
pedigree of a Poor Stupid; how infinitely more interesting than any
pedigree of the baronage, if only by reason of its rarity. I encouraged
him, therefore, by every means in my power, to leave the current
affairs of the Empire for a season, and to talk about the past of his
own race. He was nothing loath, and, after weeks of labour, we had a
family tree drawn out for him that, for hoary age, might not have been
unworthy of a seventh Earl. We had sometimes to make a perilous leap
from bough to bough, as in the best performances of this description,
but we kept that secret to ourselves.’
CHAPTER XIX.
PEDIGREE OF A POOR STUPID.
‘Swart then, to cast it in proper form, was of the Swarts of Norfolk,
and his family had been settled in that part of the country from an
extremely early time. They had subsequently removed to London, and had
planted offshoots in many of the great towns, but their earliest family
seat was a swineherd’s hovel on the bank of one of the Broads. Swart’s
father, Jeremiah Swart, more commonly known as “Jerry,” had assisted at
the rise of our great cotton industry, not exactly as one of the cotton
lords, but as one of the others. Swart had often heard his history from
his own lips. He was born in 1800, and in 1816 he took another infant
to wife, without the formality of a visit to the parson. Babes of every
age, from five and six upwards, were common enough in the factories at
that time, and they worked from twelve to fourteen and fifteen hours
a day. Puberty began early, for the temperature of the factories was
the temperature of Bombay, yet, even with this chance in their favour,
half the children never reached a marriageable age. They perished like
flies, and the few that were left, like flies of a certain sort, had
just time to arrange for the propagation of their species, and then to
die. Boys and girls, men and women, worked together, lived together.
Inspection was unknown; control of any sort, on the part of law,
equally so; their common lodging-houses, not to put too fine a point
on it, were common stews. They toiled for just as much as would keep
their bodies together; and the rate of pay was calculated on the sound
economical assumption that they had no souls.
‘Swart’s father seems to have taken the same interest in public affairs
as his more famous son. He would often tell the boy of his patriotic
satisfaction in the Act of 1816, which regulated the detention of
Napoleon at St. Helena. He felt, as he used to say, that they had got
Boney safe at last, and he could now breathe as freely as his fluffy
cough would allow. Swart’s infant mother was indifferent to that
great event, for she was bearing Swart in her bosom, at the factory,
within three days of her delivery of him into this joyous world.
Having performed this function, she went to join her ancestors, whose
pedigree, I regret to say, it is impossible to trace. Swart’s father
used to remark that he had been less fortunate than Prince Leopold,
who, on taking the Princess Charlotte to wife, at about this time,
secured 50,000_l._ a year with her, dead or alive. He meant to say,
of course, that the grant was to be continued to the Prince in the
event of the lady’s demise. It was a generous gift, for the nation
had been left in extreme poverty and misery by the great war. The
Marquis Camden subsequently surrendered his sinecure, “towards the
relief of the public burdens,” in the handsomest way in the world, and
the Prince Regent found he could spare 50,000_l._ a year from his own
ample revenues, for the same purpose. Swart’s father was particularly
touched by this last act of self-denial, and he expressed a hope that
his Prince might never want a meal. The wish must have been heard in
Heaven. The people at large were not so fortunate: they became like
wild beasts with hunger; they rioted at Ely, they rioted at Spa-Fields.
The country blazed with incendiary fires, as though for a second
celebration of the Peace. The hero who had conquered the Peace was not
forgotten; and Strathfieldsaye was purchased for the Duke of Wellington.
‘Swart’s father had once enjoyed the felicity of seeing his Grace,
and had taken so careful a note of him that he knew the number of
buttons on his blue frock-coat. It was not his only souvenir of
greatness:--“Father once met the Marquis of Waterford, when his
lordship was out on one of his larks. The Marquis gave father a black
eye, and half a crown.”’
Victoria knotted something again: I fancy it was ‘black eye.’
‘Darkness covers the Swarts for a brief space, but in the middle of
the eighteenth century they flash into view again with “Father’s great
grandfather,” sold into the Plantations for indigence, in the flower of
his age. Some of the workers had their fixed term of servitude, just
like the burglars now; their masters were at liberty to whip them,
and to impose additional years of servitude, if they ran away. “He got
nabbed in a rumpus,” says Swart, “when they was taking old Commodore
Anson’s treasure to the Tower. You look in the books, sir; you’ll find
that right. This here Commodore had sailed round the world, and had
made many rich prizes; and a million and a quarter in treasure was
taken down to the Tower to be stowed away. There was thirty-two waggon
loads of it, the old man counted ’em, and somehow our family’s never
forgot the number. All our sort turned out, as you may fancy, to see
the waggons go by. Father’s grandfather was a bit pushed at the time,
and used to sleep on a brick kiln, with a few other chaps out of luck.
There was no sleep that night; they couldn’t have closed their eyes,
he said, if it had been a bed of down. It was such a great day for
England! They all sat up singin’ songs out in the fields, till it was
time to start and see the procession. The old man allus said he wasn’t
a bit drunk, for he hadn’t tasted bite or sup that day. It was the
sight of the waggons, somehow, seemed to make him turn faint. Anyhow,
I suppose he behaved foolish, for they collared him, and as I told you,
he was sold off. He couldn’t give no account of hisself--they’ve allus
been very hard on you for that. Father’s grandfather’s wife went out
after him, all the way to this ’ere Plantation, wherever it was. It
took her three months to go, but she lost his address, and so she had
to come back. They never met again. She once did some washing for Mr.
Pitt, him that was made a nobleman: you’ll find that right. She died at
the washtub, that was the end of her. She was a game ’un, she was; no
mistake about that!”’
Poor Vickey! I see the great drops gathering, and I know they are just
going to roll over: so I push on.
‘“Some of our women didn’t turn out so well. I don’t want to foul my
own nest, sir, you understand, but it’s sometimes a great struggle in
a poor man’s family to get enough to eat for growing gals. They always
aimed above ’em though, our women did: I will say that. One of ’em took
up with a master bootmaker in Bond Street by the name of Simmons--made
for the Royal Family. That was my grandmother, as she might be called.
I’ve heard that I might give myself the name of Fitz-Simmons, if I
chose, but Swart’ll do for me. I only mention it to show that she had
not demeaned herself so much as some might think.
‘“Father’s grandfather was the man in the corner of one of Mr.
Hogarth’s pictures--the one ’avin’ his ’ed battered with the pewter.
Ah, they was ’igh old times!”
‘I could but regard this reference to a family portrait as another note
of antiquity of race. There was even some trace of a family library
in a street ballad sung by a progenitor of Swart at the Coronation of
George IV., and still in excellent preservation between the fly leaves
of the book of Truth. In rugged, but heartfelt and effusive verse, it
called on the whole earth to rejoice. A family museum of curios, often
another note of lineage, was wanting, except in so far as it might
be found in a red waistcoat that had belonged to Mr. Townsend, the
famous Bow Street runner, who had “once locked grandfather up.” Swart
had heard that it was worth money, but he could never get more than
sixpence on it at the tally shop, and he had offered it in vain to
Madame Tussaud.
‘Here the Bible record, and Swart’s memory of the direct oral tradition
ended, but I could not have his story stop. I, therefore, went down to
the Heralds’ College, and to the Record Office, and by liberal fees
to certain yellow men called searchers, found out a good deal more.
They proved to me beyond question, as I had long expected, that the
Swarts had been always with us as actors in the great drama of history,
only the managers had not thought it worth while to give them a line
in the bills. As soon as I made it worth while to search beyond the
bills, Swarts seemed to become as plentiful as blackberries. We found
that nothing had been done without them. Dig down into the foundation
of any fair structure of Imperial greatness, and you were pretty sure
to come upon a Swart, if only as rubbish for the filling-in. One of
them was certainly among the two-and-seventy thousand vagrants hanged,
or otherwise despatched, in the reign of Bluff King Hal. They were
enclosing a good deal at that time, and the Bluff one had broken
up the monasteries, where the Swarts had often found a meal. These
operations filled the country with vagrants, and the vagrants had to be
removed. They were flogged, and fined in one of their ears, for a first
offence, and hung up like flitches, for a second, and thus effectually
cured. A Swort or Swyrt, of Norfolk, which, as before stated, was their
country seat, had been branded as an able bodied loiterer as far back
as 1547.
‘To form an idea of their situation, one must watch a fly trying to
crawl out of a pot of jam. You leave him there in the morning: you find
him there at night. Never, never, in the summer’s day, nor in dateless
eternity, shall that fly get clear!’
‘You talk cruel on purpose: somebody just helps him out.’
‘Victoria, give me a chance! Suppose nobody helps him. When, by heroic
labour, he has cleared his forelegs, his wings are still coated with
the sugary mire; and, as he plants the forelegs down, to attend to the
rest of him, the forelegs are besmeared again. Let him resolve to leave
them behind, in his desperation, and he will but lose his balance, and
foul the wings once more. Poor fly! Poor Swart! Poor, Poor Stupids!
whose history through the ages is my humble theme. The only difference
is that the Swarts are sunk in slime instead of jam, and that they have
the power of breeding there, and leaving their heritage of fruitless
struggle to countless generations. Always the slime is peopled with
this race, and never shall they get out, till God send a brother to
scrape them. The tragi-comedy of the situation is found when one, by
miracle of discovery of a brother’s body for foothold, wriggles himself
free, and then stands on the brink, to comfort the others with Penny
Readings from the author of “Self Help.”
For full seven centuries, as I could trace it now, had the Swarts
been waiting for the deliverer with a potsherd. Their history was a
history of illusions in the belief that he had come at last. Once,
clearly, they thought it was Kett, for there was a Swart in his
rebellion in 1549. I hear him at their foolish Litany of human rights:
“Look at them and look at us! have we not all the same form, are we
not all born in the same way?” Eternal protest! Nature’s everlasting
whisper to the innermost heart of man--never sufficiently answered
by a knock on his head from the outside! The Earl of Warwick and his
mercenaries were prompt enough with this response, yet the Swarts
were still unconvinced. There was a Swyrte--I can but think it was
the same family, and I am confirmed in that opinion by one of our
kings-at-arms--in Wat Tyler’s affair, in the fourteenth century.
The conjecture is that he was one of the “landless men,” whom the
lawyers of the time were trying to bring back into serfage, after
their extremely informal manumission by the Black Death. Nearly sixty
thousand persons, it may be remembered, perished of that pest in
Norwich alone, and this had probably convinced the Swyrtes that it was
time to be stirring. A sort of insane joy in the ravage wrought by
the disorder, as in a clearance for right and freedom, by the Devil
as redeemer, is apparent in some of the sayings of the time; and the
surviving Swyrte in the train of Tyler may have felt, in his extremity,
that he was open to a fair offer from that other side. The sentiment
is perhaps hereditary, for I remember to have noticed a strange elation
in the Swart of the Victorian era, when the late visitation of Asiatic
cholera was threatened, or as, I fear, he took it, promised, to our
shores. His manner exhibited the tremulousness of a great uncertain
hope, and his reading of the telegrams from Marseilles and Paris in
his Sunday paper took a rhythmic cadence, as though they were portions
of a saga. The circumstance is perhaps, incidentally, suggestive of
his Norse descent, but we must not go too far. Local Kentish records
tend to show that the earlier Swyrte just mentioned had risen to a
certain eminence in the movement, the highest perhaps the family ever
attained, for a man of that name undoubtedly acted on one occasion, as
deputy tub-bearer to the “mad priest of Kent,” John Ball. Ball, as we
know, was preaching, five centuries ago, just what they are preaching
at Clerkenwell Green to-day. “Good people, things will never go well
in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be
villains and gentlemen. But what right are they whom we call lords
greater folk than we? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came
of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or
prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us
gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are
clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we
are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we
eat oat cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine
houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields.
And yet it is of us, and of our toil, that these men hold their state.”
We may easily imagine the effect of such words on one of this stupid
race.
‘When Ball was thrown into prison, his deputy tub-bearer seems to
have joined Tyler as a man of action, for the name turns up in a rude
muster-roll of the gathering at Blackheath. He was possibly one of the
band that forced their way into the Tower, and pulled the beards of the
scandalised knights, promising to be their equals and good comrades in
the time to come. He never came within touch of chivalry again, unless
he happened to be among that village remnant of revolt that fell under
its maces in the wood at Billericay, after a two days’ fight, for “the
same liberties as their lords.” But this is only matter of supposition,
and it is more likely that the Swyrte of Blackheath simply sneaked into
town on the death of his leader, to root his offshoot of this great
family in the London slime.
‘I cannot find any trace of a Swart at Cressy or at Poitiers, though
many of that sort unquestionably left their bones in France. They
were not without a monument, however, but it was in their works.
_Circumspice._ It was in the wasted fields of Aquitaine, the stretches
of utter solitude, the patches of direst poverty, league upon league
of burnt homesteads, and of famine-struck hordes going mad with misery
and rage. For the French lords being captive, the French serfs had
naturally to raise the money for their ransom, and the agony of the
operation at such a season of ravage drove them into sheer revolt. The
captive lords, after the manner of their order, exhibited an admirable
self-control; and, with much dignity, took their meals with the family
in the English castles, while they awaited the remittances that were
to set them free. So blood will always tell! The Swarts of England,
to their ruin, had wrought this ruin to the Swarts of France--as it
was in the beginning, and, probably, ever shall be, world without end.
Victoria, there is a final word!’
But she only smiled faintly, and shook her head.
‘Here, I confess, I quite lose the scent of this interesting race,
strong as it must naturally be. That some of them were doing something
at the time of the Conqueror, the heralds, and even the physiologists,
assure me is beyond a doubt. I have looked for them in the Bayeux
Tapestry; and in one prostrate figure that is being used as a foot
warmer, while his betters are presumably enjoying a view of the English
landscape, I fancy I recognise the family nose. For my own part, I am
tolerably certain that some of them were alive at Troy time, and that
somebody was sitting on them then.
‘A wonderful old family, the Swarts, the Percys of the record but a set
of _parvenus_ beside them, a family that, in all ages, has helped to
make the dark background for the picture of the beauty and the pride
of life; for the frolic group of Chaucer, for Cressy’s firework blaze
of triumph, for the Armada, for Blenheim, and for Waterloo; for the
grandiose spectacle of pomp and vanity in every field. Hey! for the
idle literature that all this while could sing its blasphemous song of
perfumed bowers, while the wynd reeked; for the idle art that could
find nothing more serious than a scheme of colour in the contrast
between these Royal purples and these beggar’s browns! And hey! for
the old, old Swarts, the true Ancients of Days! Surely they are as
venerable as the Vedas, and, beside them, the best of merely historic
stocks is but a mushroom growth. What a struggle among the tuft-hunters
to get the Swarts to dinner, could they but see this! Such a family
only want a blazon, to commend them to the world. I would suggest a
Jackass, gules, between a stick (uplifted) and a bundle of wet hay.
Motto (the same as that of the old King of Bohemia--blind, like the
whole race that bear it in good faith): “I serve.” Crest: a Fool’s cap.
Ever has that cap of the Swarts gone up for the victory, while the
caps of the Swarts’ leaders have been held out for the reward. How have
the Swarts shouted, honest folk, as province after province rolled into
the mass of Empire, till it stretched beyond the purview of the sun!
‘Whatever he had lost through the ages, Swart’s joint-stock lordship
of India remained, and he was proud of it, as I have tried to show.
A Lascar was associated with him, as a boardman, in the Indian
exhibition: they were the best of friends, but Swart made a point of
walking first. It was a question of mere precedence, and it was not
unkindly done; they always took their pipe together, at the midday
halt in the mews. The Lascar was really Swart’s hierarchical superior,
in a business point of view. He received threepence a day more than
the others, because his complexion was suited to the character of the
show. With this natural advantage, and with a turban manufactured with
rare self-denial from the tail of his own shirt, he was altogether a
specialist of publicity for such things as Indian Bitters, and the
Turkish Bath. He was more of a philosopher than Swart. He had accepted
caste as a law of Nature and of God, while the other, in the muddled
English way, only took it as it came. He could give chapter and verse
for it from his holy books. “For the sake of preserving the Universe,
the Being supremely glorious allotted separate duties to those who
sprang respectively from his mouth, his arm, his thigh, and his
foot”--Read the Dharma Sāstra; and be still!
But the difference, as he was wont to observe, did not end here,
for the foot is a thing of five toes, and there are toes, and toes.
Chancing one day to meet in the gutter another Lascar, whom he
suspected of a descent from the little toe, he spat on the ground,
and exhibited every sign of repulsion, though his countryman, who was
advertising an Arabian gum-drop, was in the same business as himself,
and, to all appearance, was as good a man. There were really three toes
between them, as he explained to Swart.
There had been an attempt to bring him into the fold of Christianity,
but it broke down. He had been led to the gate by a member of a special
mission who, without his knowing it, had given his colleague of the
little toe a rendezvous at the same place. He endured the hateful
presence as best he might, until the rite of Communion required him to
touch the cup that had just been pressed by the other’s lips. Then he
set down the untasted pledge of love and brotherhood, and turned away.
‘He had brought his lady over with him, and she lived in the seclusion
of a Whitechapel zenana, in continual fear of the effect of our foggy
climate on her lord’s remaining lung. She was far from her own people,
and if she became a widow, how could she hope to be treated with the
requisite indignity during the funeral rite? Burning was, of course,
out of the question, but who would tear out her nose-ring, and the
cartilage with it, in the regular respectable way, or buffet her, and
load her with reproaches, for daring to survive him? She knew her Manu
and her Sāstras as many of our own estimable poor know their own Holy
Books, and they had taught her that great lesson of humility to man
which, in the end, all such books are made to teach. “A woman is not to
be relied on”--she had the text by heart--“a husband must be revered
as a god by a virtuous wife.” Poor slaves of the slave! beautiful and
tender creatures, ever the most apt in the learning of subjection! when
will your turn come? Victoria, my tale is done.’
Victoria toyed with her scarf awhile as though to remember all the
points, then untied it knot by knot, in sheer weariness of soul.
‘And is that England, is that the Empire?’ she said, fixing me with her
eyes in a way I did not exactly like.
‘Oh no, not altogether. Don’t let me be unfair. There are hundreds of
square miles of beauty, refinement, luxury; exquisitely ordered homes,
fine-natured men, courteous, suave, poised, high-bred from the bone;
white women, oh, so white! some of them able to read Greek--Learning
robed and perfumed. And for parties, picture galleries, libraries, when
they give their minds to such things, they are not to be matched. We
are particularly proud of one square mile bounded by Oxford Street,
Piccadilly, Regent Street, and Park Lane; and are wont to repeat the
boast at public dinners that, for intelligence, culture, wit, and the
high qualities of civilisation, it has not its territorial equivalent
on the face of the earth.’
‘The greater shame for them; why do they leave the other square miles
as they are?’
‘There are charities, you know.’
‘Charities!--ointment for a cancer. What makes the disease? There must
be something going on that none of you find out. I know there must be.
How can all those fine people live a day, an hour, till they do find
it out? What do they talk about while they are having their dinners?
I know they could find it out, if they tried. Let us try and find it
out, before we go home: we have still half an hour left. I have been
thinking, all the time you talked: it must be selfishness. Everybody
gets what he can, instead of what he ought, and of course the clever
people get most. Then they give a little of it back to the Poor Stupids
in what you call charity, and go on making the money and the misery all
the same. That is the way it strikes me. How do the rich people get
rich? Don’t you know you can’t be rich without doing wrong, whether you
know you are doing wrong, or not. Can you now? At the best, even, if
you are not a robber, you are using your cleverness to take some one
else’s share. And to think of all those people looking so nice, and
smelling like flowers, and talking like expensive books, and trying to
get richer than other people all the time; oh! the sly things! How _do_
you grow rich? I wonder how it is done.’
‘Always, at the beginning, of course, by getting as much as you can
for yourself, and giving as little as you can to others; buying in the
cheapest, and selling in the dearest is the accepted phrase. Sometimes,
this has happened so long ago that the possessors are able to forget
it ever happened. They are usually put up to do the talking about
unselfishness.’
‘Just what I thought; so the dealer that buys the match boxes made in
Mr. Swart’s house buys them, not for what he ought, but for what he
can.’
‘Can is the only ought in practical life.’
‘I see; and that makes the poor people hungry and cold.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And when they are very hungry, and very cold, the dealer, and his
well-to-do friends give them a little soup and a blanket.’
‘That’s about it.’
‘Oh, how funny! how funny! how funny!’
‘What would you have him do?’
‘What would you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You do know. Is there anything but one thing--take less himself, and
give them more?’
‘Then he would not be so rich as the other match box makers.’
‘Well?’
‘And he would have to live in a smaller house.’
‘Well?’
‘And give up his carriage.’
‘Well?’
‘Then he’ll be damned if he’ll do it, Vickey, so there!’
‘That may be; I am only talking of what he ought to do. But I think you
are wrong. He would, if he knew, only he does not know. Perhaps the
clergyman sometimes forgets to tell him. Never mind that; let us go on;
it is so amusing. Tell me some other ways of making money.’
‘Well, you invest in Companies, and take the profits as they come.’
‘Without asking how the profits are made, how the people live that make
the profits?’
‘Usually so. Now and then the question is asked, but the questioner
is called an eccentric. There was one shareholder that made a great
fuss about the tramway people, who are worked almost into brutishness
for the sake of the dividend. It was only a woman, you know; and her
out-of-the-way proceeding made her quite notorious at once. The truth
is, everybody feels that the poor people would grind each other just as
hard, if they could.’
‘Ah, the poor people would like to be just as wicked as their betters!
Is that what you mean?’
‘I think it is, Miss Socrates.’
‘But how _do_ the betters spend the money? What can be the use of it
after all?’
‘The use of it? Did you never hear of yachting, hunting, pretty
pictures, pretty women, good wine? Poor little savage, you have never
had so much as a taste of life! Why you may spend twenty or thirty
thousand pounds in getting a good breed of race-horses, if that is
your hobby. You get a hobby, that’s the way it’s done--horses, hounds,
women, pictures, or china, anything will do--and keep on sinking your
money till you have the rarest and the best.’
‘Is there any taste in that way as to improving the breed of men? Does
a rich man ever buy a slum, and keep on playing with it till he has
turned it into a paradise?’
‘No; breeding is chiefly done for the shows.’
‘Are all the people in Europe as funny as that?’ said Victoria, ‘or is
it only the English? But see, the sun has struck the big banyan: it is
dinner time! What a lot you have told me, but you have only told me
half. There are Rich Stupids, I see, as well as Poor Stupids, and I
think the rich ones are the worse off.’
CHAPTER XX.
A VILLAGE FESTIVAL.
It has never occurred to me till this moment, but certainly we two live
here alone. There are a few other people on the Island, I believe, and
I see them every day, but only as pictures. I talk to them too, but
only as one talks to pictures, not much heeding the answer back.
I have seen the Ancient, of course, and have had many a talk with him.
There are the evenings; and it is not Victoria all the time. I am one
of the great family, and I come and go in that unnoticed way which is
the true footing of friendship and love.
I am more particularly aware of the Ancient just now, because he is
issuing a proclamation. There is to be a public holiday in celebration
of the Queen’s birthday, and the proclamation is to regulate the
order of proceedings. It is written on a slate, and hung outside his
Excellency’s hut. He has been elaborating it for days, with my modest
help, for the text, and Victoria’s, for the common sense. Whenever
we are going to do anything foolish, she interrupts from the window,
where she sews by the fading light. She has thus effectually vetoed the
following projects--a review of the garrison; a banquet with speeches;
and a levée at Government House.
It is all settled now. There is to be a Spelling Bee at the
schoolhouse, followed by a lecture on the Antiquities of the Island,
by the schoolmaster. The populace will then be released for Sports and
Pastimes, with prizes ranging from a nosegay to a sack of potatoes. For
the wind-up, there is to be another lecture, ‘to steady their minds,’
and I am to be the lecturer.
I fought hard against it; I honestly did, but I was overborne.
‘Something about England, sir; we are never tired of that.’ The voice
from the window assented, and then I gave way.
It begins, it begins; never mind the preliminaries, the blessed day is
here! _Vive la joie!_ Three fowling-pieces fire a salute, the first
thing in the morning, and proclaim our revel to the universe. The
Union Jack is run up at the flag-staff. Our breakfasts are despatched
in a few minutes, and in less than an hour we are amid the fierce
excitements of the Bee.
The competition is open to all comers, but it is, in effect, confined
to the younger folk. The scholars, in their best, sit at one end of the
schoolroom, with the schoolmaster in front of them, to call time, and
an admiring audience beyond. The severity of the struggle betokens much
secret preparation. The first heat is the spelling of proper names from
Scripture. ‘Achaichus’ is attacked with much spirit, and carried with
a shout, but we have to mourn the loss of some of our number before
the flag waves over the conquered word. ‘Achaicharus’ yields in time,
though it leaves but few survivors of a forlorn hope. ‘Habaziniah’
covers the field with slain, yet still we win. ‘Geuel,’ owing to some
invincible difficulty in the placing of the vowels, plunges many of the
competitors into tears. ‘Gezerites’ restores us all to good humour with
a sense of universal failure. We cannot manage the final ‘s,’ where it
is emphatic--a disability common to all our Island folk.
I pass over the other heats, to come to that lecture on Antiquities.
Like the memorable trial, it is a function held in the open air. We
break up the Bee, and troop forth, the man of learning at our head,
and examine a few huge flat stones, which we have seen a hundred times
before. They are the gravestones of our pre-historic race. There is
one in front of a cottage, whither it has been removed to make a
flag-stone for the porch. Another lies, where the vanished men left it,
in a field on the other side of the Ridge. We know what we should find
beneath, if we took it up--a human skeleton sleeping the long sleep,
with a pearl shell for a pillow. For centuries it has slept there; for
centuries let it sleep on. We cross the Ridge again, to the Peak where
I first met Victoria; and we are told to look for the traces of four
rude stone figures that once stood there on a platform, as though to
keep eternal watch upon the sea. Most of us have seen these traces from
our earliest infancy, but we look for them again with great diligence,
and communicate the result with the cries appropriate to sudden and
unexpected discovery--all to please the schoolmaster. We ask how they
came there? what they signify?--’tis a part of the game. We are told
that they afford undoubted evidence of a remoter Island race. But how
did the race reach the Island? The lecturer bids us guess. Is there
one of us so ill-bred as to hazard the suggestion of a boat? Not one!
We play out our honest piece honestly, to the last scene. We hold our
tongues: our virtue, or our habit, or verbal veracity will not allow us
to do more. A rosy brown infant, who cries ‘I know,’ is hustled to the
rear by Victoria, and has his mouth stopped with an orange. For that
matter, the whole comedy is devoid of guile.
The lecturer knows that we might all echo the cry of the infant; only
he must have an opening for his line:--‘How about a raft from the
Gambier Islands, three hundred miles away?’ ‘Ah, yes, a raft to be
sure! But then, why should they come here?’ It is impossible to deny
him that. ‘Suppose they came because they couldn’t help it,’ returns
the man of lore. ‘That would certainly alter the case. But how?’ He
needs no more. ‘In earlier times, especially, and even within living
memory, it was the custom of the rude natives of the South Pacific to
put their vanquished enemies on a raft, and commit them to the mercy of
the waves.’ There is more of it, but this may serve.
‘Come, and I will show you something,’ says the good man; and we follow
him again--this time down the steep path to the market grove, and up
the other steep path to the settlement, and through the settlement,
till we stop at his own cottage door, and come to a final halt in
his bedroom, which is the museum of the Island. What matter, if we
have already seen the solitary shelf that holds the entire national
collection! What matter, if these spear heads and axe heads of stone
are only less familiar to the hand than our own knives and forks! We
are doing a fellow-creature a kindness--that is enough. And the way of
doing it is so pleasant to ourselves! It is the ideal combination duty
and delight. For, that walk to the museum was a walk through the fields
of Paradise, with barelegged children for attendant angels, fleet as
any shapes with wings. Behind these, the bigger lads and lasses, too
old for play, too young for love, trod the rock, as though it were soft
cloud, in the lightness of their perfect strength. And behind them,
man and maiden, maiden and man, dragged the slow foot of the deepest
spiritual joy. May the time be far distant when they, too, shall sleep
on the pearl shell!
I have forgotten all about my lecture, until the schoolmaster reminds
me of it, at the conclusion of his own. He uses the freedom of a
brother artist to make a courteous inquiry as to my choice of a topic,
and I am obliged to confess that no thought of preparation for the
coming duty has once entered my mind. ‘We shall expect you to do your
best for us,’ he says, with a smile. ‘I could not venture to do less,’
is my answer, ‘after what I have just heard.’ But this, like most
smooth sayings, leaves us just where we were. I begin to cast about for
a theme. ‘I have seen your festival; how would you like to hear of a
festival on a larger scale, on the other side of the world? “A Roman
Holiday”--what do you think of that?’
‘But you said you would tell us something about England.’
‘I mean a holiday in modern Rome; and modern Rome, you know, is on the
banks of the Thames.’
‘That would do perfectly. Would you like to sit in my bedroom, and
collect your thoughts?’
‘He will collect nothing there, but stones and bones,’ says Victoria,
who has lingered with us. ‘He wants watching, if you are to get any
work out of him. Nobody can manage him, but me. Come, sir, come along!’
One may be in leading like a bear, or like a man of genius; and I hope
I am not a bear. My leader makes straight for the Peak, by the grove
sacred to her tenderest thoughts. She establishes me on the ruins of
the platform, solitary now, for it will not be the scene of a lecture
for another year. As she leaves me, I receive the order to remain
perfectly still, in profitable meditation, until her return. I promise,
and I perform. I throw myself down on my back, watch the floating
billions of light globules that seem to make the substance of the air,
and wonder if each of them, all proportions preserved, holds a divine
Victoria, and a contemplative Me. What a conception of the infinite
in happiness, if it could be so! Then, anon, a light footstep warns
me that she is here again; and I leave all speculation for the sweet
and sufficient certainty that the larger globule holds us two. She
has a basket of fruit in her hand; but is it Flora or is it Minerva?
The emblems are confusing, for a pencil and a little note-book lie on
the top of the store. The bananas and the guavas are to make a lunch
for the lonely thinker; the pencil and the paper are to preserve his
precious thoughts for the lecture, ere they fly away. I stretch out an
eager hand for the eatables, but she offers me the pencil first.
‘Put down what you have been thinking about while I was away.’
How doubly delicious it would be if there were but a shade of coquetry
in it; but there is not--not the shadow of a shade.
‘I have been thinking about the Infinite.’
‘What a waste of time! I thought it was to be about Roman Holidays.’
‘It! What? Oh, the lecture. Yes.’
‘Do you mean to say you have not been--oh, how lazy you are!’
‘And how silly, you, my Victoria! but I like you best that way.’
‘What have I to do with it?’
‘So much that, without you, the whole world----’
‘Will you eat a banana?’
‘I do not mind, if you will eat one too.’
‘I have no appetite.’
‘Nor I.’
‘You seemed quite hungry just now.’
‘So I was.’
She was kneeling with the basket before her, and she began to
straighten her shape, always, with her, a sign of a certain
concentration of feeling. But she still retained her posture, and she
looked like a fragment of a grand statue, broken short off at the hem
of the robe.
‘Don’t you think you are a little uncertain in your sayings and doings,
sometimes? If you are hungry, why won’t you eat?’
‘It is a hunger strike.’
‘What is that?’
‘An invention of the Siberian captives. When they are very sick of
everything, they strike against their dinners, and die.’
‘You need not starve yourself to get anything in our gift,’ she said,
and her glance intensified the grave beauty of her face.
It was too delicious; who could have helped going on?
‘Yes, I know; I have everything, and still I want one thing more.’
‘Oh, now I understand,’ she said, rising to her full height, and making
a great litter of fruit and writing materials, as she overturned the
basket. ‘Oh, I understand perfectly; I know exactly what you want to
say. You need not go on with your half meanings, in that sly way. You
said it once before, and you promised you would never say it again.’
Silly Victoria, she has spread all the cards on the table, and killed
the game! One short half-hour’s lesson in a London boudoir, for that
matter, in a London schoolroom, would have taught her how to play.
This comes of being brought up to tell the truth like a Quaker, by an
Ancient in a savage isle.
‘All the same, Victoria, I won’t eat my lunch.’
‘Dear friend, dear, dear friend, if I might only say to you all I want
to say! But why do you trouble me so, why do you try to make me do
wrong?’
It was my turn to jump up now, and to take her hand, which she did not
refuse.
‘Victoria, who can contend against you? You play by your own rules, and
mine seems the sharper’s game. Come, the hunger strike is over; hand up
the fruit.’
Victoria peeled the bananas, and I ate them. This arrangement was
nearly as good as the best. It was glorious sunshine again in her face,
as in the sky above. ‘Not more than others I deserve, yet God hath
given me more,’ was my humble grace.
By-and-by, but all too soon, I was left to my reflections once more.
Victoria withdrew, on the understanding that I should work at my
lecture during her absence. I watched her to the foot of the slope,
fixing myself in an attitude of meditation when she turned to watch
me. I saw her skirmishing with a band of infant wanderers who wanted to
climb to my study, and heading them off, with much ingenuity, into an
orchard beyond the Ridge.
I really tried to work, but it was impossible. The sounds and sights
of the fête came up to me, on my lofty post of observation, from all
the peopled region of the Isle, and from the more distant summits on
the other side, that rose like towers from the wall of rock. Distance
subdued every laugh and shout, every cry of bird or beast, into perfect
harmony with the rhythmic beat of the waves; and the sounds seemed but
varied modes of musical silence. There was the same harmony in the
tints, seen through the wide stretches of summer mist. It was sometimes
almost impossible to say where the flowers ended, and the men and women
began. You might tell it only by the motion of the figures darting in
and out of the patches of blossom, as pursuers and pursued. The pairs
that sauntered soon became absolutely one with the landscape, as they
moved further from the point of view. It was exquisite to the sense
and to the soul, as an image of the unity of nature. Sky and earth
and sea, man and woman, flower and tree, seemed but so many forms
and manifestations of one universal element of beauty, each separate
perception of the beholder realising them in a uniform impression, in
its own way. I was busy with this fancy, face downwards in the grass,
and trying to work it out in consultation with a wild-flower, when
Victoria surprised me again. If she had sought my life, it would have
been hers, for she was within a yard of me, before I knew that she was
there.
‘Princess, hear my confession before you begin to frown. I have done
nothing; nothing--nothing done! Now I _will_ begin, just whenever you
like. Only I cannot work here; I must go somewhere else.’
‘Home to your own room?’
‘Stuffy!’
‘Where then?’ Tapping the turf carpet with her naked foot.
‘I know; only I mustn’t say.’
‘Just say it out.’
‘To the Cave; the Cave of the Great Scrape, where we went before.’
‘Madness! You’ll just be killed, if you try it.’
‘Was I killed the first time?’
‘I helped you.’
‘I want you to help me again.’
‘I wonder why I like you at all, and I do like you so much.’ Then,
after a pause, ‘If God meant to let you be killed, He would never make
me help to do it. Come along.’
This feat of engineering having been once described, the courteous
reader may wish to be spared the repetition of its details. It is
enough to say that I was soon walking along the narrow ridge, with my
eyes closed, by order, and with my hands on the shoulders of Victoria,
who led the way. Just before the eyes closed, they caught one look of
tenderest concern in hers that was a thing to remember for a lifetime.
When I was allowed to open them again, we were both in the Cave.
Victoria left, the moment she saw me safe, promising to come back in an
hour, and fetch me out.
CHAPTER XXI.
A ROMAN HOLIDAY.
I was alone with the clouds, the ocean, and my note-book. I could
attend to the note-book, only by forgetting the ocean and the clouds;
so, after one last look at them, I retired to the back of the Cave, and
set to work.
NOTES FOR THE LECTURE.
‘_Old England and Old Rome; Parallel._--England, my friends, you are
to understand, is in the position of Old Rome after the conquest. She
is sitting down to enjoy the world she has won. She wants no more:
after dinner, the lion would not hurt a fly. She feels the lassitude of
digestion, especially in governing circles. Yet, somehow, the duties
of empire are still carried on. Rome fed all her children from the
subject realms, and they all grew lazy. England feeds only some of
hers, and, what with need and hunger, the watch of empire is duly kept.
The reliefs are sent out to the distant provinces; the pro-consuls come
home regularly to die of liver-complaint in ancestral halls. Take a
bird’s-eye view of our hemisphere, and you would see its main roads of
earth and ocean speckled with the foam or dust that marks the movements
of her legions. ’Tis a pretty sight!
‘_Holiday Preparations._--The public holidays in England are ordained
by law, and, three or four times a year, there is a general suspension
of work in this workshop of the world. It is a Sabbath of popular
festivity. One of its first signs is the general migration from town
of the select few. All who can possibly manage it get out of the
way--only, of course, to leave more room for the others. It is just
like them.
‘London is given up to its masses, with all its spacious environs. The
streets are theirs, the parks are theirs. Every lamp-post in the slums
is turned into a screw swing.
‘_Adaptiveness of the Race._--The diversions of infancy among the
English masses are of primitive simplicity. The youthful slummer
plays, as the mature savage wrought, with the rudest tools. His swing
is the knotted fragment of a clothes-line; and, in the national game,
he demands no more than a bundle of old coats for the wicket, with a
splinter of deal for the bat. This healthy contempt for “plant” shows
the adaptiveness of the race, its readiness in making the most of the
materials that come to hand. Waterloo was won in the playing fields of
Eton, and Australia in the playing fields of Seven Dials. Walk through
St. James’s Park on a public holiday, and you can no longer doubt it.
Cricket is contrived with the implements aforesaid; football, with an
old hat, or a broken kettle. The same adaptiveness is shown in all
the arrangements: the average of breech, to the extent of nakedness
it has to cover, may be put at about three-fifths. Yet there are no
glaring whites to mar the beauty of the landscape; and even the faces
are in a sort of keeping of pale green. Artists might picture this Bank
Holiday scene in the Park; it could hardly fail to attract attention
at Burlington House. The sicklier children, and the very young, play
in the alleys nearer home, where the dust is considerately left in
sufficient abundance to enable them to make their mud-pies. Many play
in the old graveyards adjacent to these alleys, recently opened to
them by the munificence of a public-spirited society. This is perhaps
the highest example of our national readiness to make the best of
circumstances.
‘_Note._--Sketch of Tom All Alone’s--real or supposed--on a public
holiday, as one of the most suggestive sights of the universe: “Tom All
Alone’s; with a few observations on Russell Court and Vinegar Yard.”
Ancient cemetery or native barrow of district, consisting of three
back-yards rolled into one; now a public playground, dedicated for
ever, etc., with becoming circumstance, as local “boon.” To get it into
focus, should be seen from the meadows about Eton College. So seen,
will inspire sentiments of devout gratitude to God for the mysteries of
patience, far surpassing the mysteries of faith, in the souls of men.
Tom All Alone’s, as something to be thankful for. Ha! ha! ha! (try to
laugh here). Oh, by what magic, by what magic, do we get them to take
this irreducible minimum in settlement of the human claim? (try not to
weep).
‘Same adaptability, too, in grown-up natives of region--veritable note
of our race. Require no costly machinery of enjoyment. Take a plank of
wood, put a row of taps and glasses on one side, and, on the other,
a kind of horse box in which fifteen or twenty people may manage to
stand upright, and you have “house of entertainment.” A young woman
turns taps, as fast as she can, and fills glasses; people in horse-box
empty them with equal dispatch; and public enjoyment is at its height.
Marble tables, public gardens, flowers, music, not indispensable. A
trough would be simpler still; but horses do not care for gin, and the
higher animal would object to it, as it implies the unsound principle
of community of goods.
‘Here, in these houses of entertainment, they exchange their artless
confidences, and settle their family affairs. Not inquisitive about
future; have learned to take short views. Whenever perplexed about
problems of destiny, and their own relations of joy to this joyous
world, they nod to young woman, who turns tap, and their perplexities
disappear.
‘_Note._--The beautiful modesty of their demand on life might teach
even shepherds a lesson in content. Their simple attainable standard in
wine, in woman, in music, in light, in joy. Their conversation--direct
and plain, free from tortuous refinements of studied wit; their
badinage, usually no more than the light play of the pewter on one
another’s heads. All their pleasures of the same simple description.
Will spend their leisure very contentedly in watching a dog worrying
a pitfull of rats, or two men beating each other into insensibility
with gloves that only seem to hurt. As childlike as the North American
Indians, and not unlike them in the race type--high cheek bones; a wide
mouth, massively lipped; slits for the eyes. See them on the great
public days, pouring out in myriads to a horse race, boat race, or Lord
Mayor’s Show; and own the wonders of a social and religious system that
has suffered them to find satisfaction in this state, or us to find
content.
‘Amplify admiration of the system, in the lyric vein--rhythmic prose,
etc.
‘_Their Women._--Like their North American sisters, fond of feathers
and bright hues. No gaudier thing in nature than the coster girl in
her holiday dress of mauve, with the cruel plume that seems to have
been dyed in blood. Relation of female to male, singular survival of
primitive state. Love-making always, in form at least, an abduction
of the virgin. A meeting at the street corner in the dusk, for the
beginning of the ceremony; then a chase round the houses, the heavy
boots after the light ones, with joyous shrieks to mark the line of
flight; after that, the seizure, the fight, with sounding slaps for
dalliance that might knock the wind out of a farrier of the Blues.
In the final clutch, skirts part in screeching rents, feathers strew
the ground. Then the panting pair return, hand in hand, to the street
corner, to begin again.
‘_A Night Piece._--Nightfall brings the whole slum together, at the
universal rendezvous, from every near or distant scene; men, and those
that were once maidens, mumbling age and swearing infancy, stand
six-deep before the slimy bar, till the ever flowing liquor damps down
their fiercest fires, and the great city is once more at rest. The
imagination of him that saw Hell could hardly picture the final scene.’
* * * * *
‘Are you ready?’
The voice came from the rock above, and it was hers.
‘Yes, pining for liberty--please let me out.’
‘Have you done your work?’
‘Yes.’
‘Word of honour?’
‘Word of honour!’
‘I am coming--you may come and look at me, if you like; but mind: don’t
you try to look down.’
I walked to the mouth of the Cave, and there, a few yards above me,
was the beautiful head peeping over the summit, the eyes smiling down
into mine. Only the face was visible; she must have been stretched full
length on the rock.
A few moments, and I was in soft delicious touch of her again, as we
crept along the ledge; and I kept touch, as we crossed the angle of the
slope on our way to the schoolhouse, for, though help was no longer
needed, Victoria still let me guard her hand. And so we walked through
the twilight, without wanting to speak a word.
That lecture was never delivered. When I saw all their happy faces
in the schoolroom, I felt that I could not spoil their holiday. I
accordingly chose another subject, while the Ancient was making his
introductory speech, and trusted to my star. The star was friendly. The
Ancient wasted a good deal of time; and, when he sat down, I was ready
for a spirited improvisation on the Benefits of the Printing Press,
with which they were perfectly content.
‘Light the torches, Reuben,’ said the old man when the applause had
subsided, ‘and let the youngsters go bird-nesting on the Ridge, for the
wind-up. Victoria, and all the girls that are good girls, will stay
behind and sing us a song. There is light enough on the Green.’
CHAPTER XXII.
MISUNDERSTANDING.
A quarrel with Victoria?--no, not a quarrel, I want another word. Only
‘a something.’ What is it? I do not know.
Victoria has become ‘unaccountable’--we will put it in that way. There
is no knowing what to be at with Victoria: the grievance is there. And
I have tried so hard to find out.
That affair of the Peak was a lesson, or I tried to make it one. ‘Leave
Victoria alone,’ it seemed to say, ‘and keep your homage, respectful
and other, to yourself. Victoria wants to tell you something, but does
not know how to begin. Cannot you save her the trouble? You confuse her
with your homage, respectful and other, and she wants you to leave her
alone. Curly stops the way.
‘What matter that Curly is as vague as something in Orion! He has taken
her heart with him into space. Leave her alone.
‘Do you want further proof of it? How many more times must you see her
prostrate before his shrine in the thicket, as you saw her yesterday,
when you dogged her footsteps like a spy? How many more times must
you hear her cry, “Come back, come back, and help me!” between her
passionate kisses of the bits of fetich on the boughs?
‘And, if there were no Curly, how would that avail? Victoria is not for
you. Are you to stay here for ever? You know you are not. And how could
you take Victoria away?
‘Victoria is a savage; and who would have her anything else? Will you
put Pocahontas in crêpe de Chine and surah, in lace, embroideries, and
gimp, and transplant her to the London drawing-rooms, to make sport for
the London crowd? Are you looking forward to this: “A lady whose tall
figure is well known in London society wore black silk, opening over a
front of white silk muslin, draped from neck to feet, and confined at
the waist with a pointed band of black velvet, fastened by a diamond
clasp”?
‘It will not do.
‘Friendship is impossible on your side: when you are with her, you
invariably play the fool. Keep out of her way.’
So, I am on longer Victoria’s shadow. I wander alone. I make up to the
Ancient, and borrow his fowling piece, to pay my respects to the wild
birds. The wild birds do not mind. I trouble them a good deal less than
I trouble Victoria. It is an old fowling piece; how did men contrive
to kill anything in the days when it was made, especially to kill one
another? The slaughter of Malplaquet quite enhances one’s respect
for the race, and takes rank with Stonehenge and the Pyramids among
material marvels wrought by simple means.
I have kept this up for some days, and I am popping at a flock of gulls
this morning, with so slight a breach of the good understanding between
us that the flock increases, by the effect of intelligent curiosity, as
the sport goes on, when Victoria stands between me and the light.
It is here that Victoria begins to be unaccountable: on the strength of
this incident, I made the charge.
For Victoria has come to look for me. There is no need to guess it: she
says so in terms. Only mark what follows this admission, and say if I
am without a grievance.
‘Why have you come to look for me, Victoria?’
‘I am so miserable.’
‘Why?’
‘You make me miserable.’
‘What have I done, Princess?’
‘What have _I_ done? You have hardly spoken to me for three days.’
‘I thought you would like that best, Victoria.’
‘Why should you think so? What would this place be to me, if we were
bad friends?’
‘I trouble you.’
‘Leave me to judge of that. There cannot be any harm in seeing you, in
talking to you.’
So, I leave the disgusted gulls; and we ramble to the further side of
the Island, to the place where I landed in the dawn of history to find
the New World.
We do not talk much at first. I am working out the situation, with due
aid from certain phrases of convention that help to reconcile poverty
of thought to self-respect. These little felicities of epigram on the
inconsistency of Woman never helped anybody to comprehension of her;
yet, if they were taken out of its phrase books, the world would be
acutely sensible of the void. Few people are inconsistent, but a good
many people fail to understand. I wish I were not so dull. I seem to
have found Victoria to about as much purpose as a savage might find a
watch.
So, for some precious moments, it is the old footing again. We are as
free as the other animals about us, and perhaps still more exquisitely
happy. It might be rash, though, to attempt to answer for any but
ourselves. Our myriads of birds and insects, and our select assortment
of beasts, seem to have a good time--a life in the sun, and a quick
death in their prime of strength, with their business hours mainly
employed in dining, and in exercise in the open air. Most of the beasts
belong to the Island family as much as the men and women; and Victoria
could give them each a name. With her, they only play at being wild;
and the outlaw goats seek her as regularly for their morning caress as
their friends who have made their peace with civilisation.
If she and I could be like this for ever! But we cannot. We seem to
be friends and strangers, by turns; for the life of me, I know not
why. We move to and from each other in some mysterious way. For, what
happened just now, happens again and again. I am with her, as I could
always wish to be, till some subtle change in her manner makes me think
she wants me to keep away. I keep away, and she seeks me out, with
reproaches for coldness and neglect. We reach perfection, and then
imperfection begins. Slowly, slowly, as some change in the colour of a
plant, comes Victoria’s new mistrust of me, or of herself. What is it?
what can it be? It is a movement of some strange law of her emotions;
but what is the law? The savage has learned so much about his watch
as to feel the utter inadequacy of the reflection that watches have
curious ways. He cannot examine, but he begins to guess. There is but
one guess to make, the old one--it must be the phantasm of the living
Curly that stands between us and the perfect light. We know what came
of that guess before. If I step back to make way for him, Victoria
will follow, to know the reason why. A pest on him for a phantom that
plays us on and off: it is neither my fault, nor Victoria’s; it is the
phantom that does not know its own mind!
CHAPTER XXIII.
ANOTHER SAIL.
Let him be forgotten for the moment. There is a new ship off the Point!
Not an English ship this time--a Yankee, by her beautiful flag.
It is the old scene--the hurried assembling of the people; the signals
and answering signals; the manning of the surf boat; the meeting of
the elders for consultation as to ways and means of reception. But
this meeting is for serious work. The new ship is a trader; and only
a ship of war imports no danger to these defenceless folk. There may
be a rough crew, not too well in hand, fierce men, beyond punishment
for excess, immediate or remote. If they choose to go wrong, the whole
Island is at their mercy, not only in goods and chattels, but in the
honour of the women, the lives of all.
The troubled Ancient, I think, would like to bury his treasure of
maidens for awhile, if only he might hope to dig them up again, safe
and sound, when the danger is past. He looks about him with the furtive
glance that seeks a hiding-place, like some Jute progenitor on the
approach of a pirate horde. But he wisely gives no public sign of
alarm, and he sets out in his whaler to board the new-comer, with a
cheerful face.
All depends upon the character of the Captain, and we are re-assured
upon that point the moment he steps ashore. He gives a ‘candy’ from his
pocket to a child, and lifts his hat to one of the girls in a way that
is unmistakeable as a sign of genuine respect.
He is unlike all other sea captains, past and present, if not to come.
He is a young, blonde dandy, with his hair parted in the middle,
regular features, and a silken moustache. These appearances would
be altogether difficult to harmonise with his functions, but for
the firm set of the lips, and the glance of the clear blue eye. His
handkerchief is slightly scented--there cannot be a doubt of it, and
he is above the suspicion of a quid. His speech sometimes betrays his
origin, but does not, in the least, betray his calling. He ‘shivers’ no
‘timbers’--but none of them ever do that. He occasionally talks like
a book, and rather like a book read aloud in class. This, however,
is only when he has time to think of himself, and to behave at his
best. At these moments, happily rare, his construction is anything but
idiomatic; it is classically ornate. The Americanism appears in his
puritanical anxiety to give every word, and every letter of every word,
its full phonetic value. He extends the principles of the Declaration
of Independence to his syllables, and makes them all free and equal,
without a trace of accentuation that might render one the tyrant of
the rest. His orthoepic constitution for the language, in short, is a
constitution without a king. Yet he has the fear of Webster ever before
his eyes, and that authority is evidently his Supreme Court.
We lodge him in our house, at my request. This, I believe, anticipates
a desire of the Ancient, who, while awaiting fuller knowledge, wants
to have him under his eye. He shares my chamber, and is accommodated
with a spare bed therein. His crew, with one or two exceptions, abide
on the ship, but they have shore leave, and, before they have it, so
says the Ancient, who brought him off, he makes them a short speech,
which is evidently remembered throughout their entire stay. He is a
restless man. Almost as soon as he takes up his quarters under our
roof, he leaves them; and, before sundown, he has walked all over the
Island; has inquired into its systems of government, laws, agriculture,
commerce, and manufactures; has recognised the clock as a gift
from Chicago, the organ as a present from Salem; and has suggested
improvements in nearly every process of industry, that would double the
yield. He has also asked to see our newspaper; and, without waiting
to learn that we do not possess such a thing, has offered us a bundle
of journals of both hemispheres which, he says, may supply ‘items’ of
interest for the compilation of the local sheet.
At first he was taciturn, or merely interrogatory; and he showed
extreme caution in his communications to us. But, towards evening, all
this disappeared, and his fluency, and readiness to relate his own
story left nothing to be desired.
It was the typical American career of the past, and so, for all his
freshness and alertness, I thought him an old-fashioned man. The new
generation of Americans are mostly men of one career, as we are: this
one was of half a dozen. He had begun life as an office boy, had been
a real-estate agent, a lawyer, an editor of a newspaper, and was now a
skipper, by what he considered a process of quite orderly development.
He had sailed from San Francisco, and he was going to make the tour
of the world, by way of Suez and the Mediterranean, Liverpool and New
York. His ship was his own property, and her cargo was his pocket-money
for the voyage. The Ancient asked him how he learned the trade of the
sea, but he seemed unaware that there was a trade to learn. He could
hardly remember a time when he did not know it, in its elements. As a
boy, he used to sail a yacht about New York Bay; and he had served a
year in a whaler, before the mast. At one time, he had thought of going
into art.
How had he learned editing, then? That, too, he hardly knew. All
crafts, he assured us, were governed by the same general principle
of common sense. Editing a newspaper was but sailing a ship, under
new conditions. You put your mind to it, and you rounded your back
for the burden of your inevitable mistakes. If he had a natural turn,
he thought, it was for scheming things, and getting down to first
principles. In the course of his journalistic experiences, it had
once been his duty to turn out a weekly column of jokes. He was not a
joker by taste, nor by choice, but he could invent jokes, of course,
if it had to be done. He studied out the principles of the thing,
and he found that they lay in startling contrasts, and in startling
similitudes. With a little practice, he soon became able to make a joke
on anything--the inkstand on his desk, the rent in the carpet, the
passing shower. He settled the points beforehand, and then worked up to
them, straight and sharp. The failures came from ‘fooling around’ the
subject. He made two or three jokes for us, as specimens. He did this
with a perfectly grave face, apologising for a certain rustiness of
habit due to his having been for some time out of that line. They were
really very fair jokes; and, if we had not been so fully forewarned
of the expected result, I think we might have laughed. They had to be
‘popped’ on you, as he explained. The Ancient promised to try them on
Reuben, and our new acquaintance warranted they would make him gay. On
the same general principle of observation, he had invented a way of
simplifying a ship’s rig, saving 45 per cent. in cordage and blocks;
and he promised to show us a model of it, made on the voyage.
By nightfall, we felt that he had exhausted us and our little island,
and that he would fain be off. This, however, was impossible for the
moment: the ship wanted more fresh provisions, and she was, besides,
under slight repairs. It fretted him sorely, for he could not be
still. Never did I see such feverish activity, such a passion for
doing something. His meals were a mockery of Divine Providence; but,
as he did not choke, he must have been reserved for special uses. In
ten minutes he had disposed of fish, flesh, and his hunk of pie. Only
a Rabelais could conceive the war of elements within. There was no
rest in him, nor near him; he was busy all over the surface of life,
with no sense of the true uses of any one thing. It was a sheer fury of
industrial action, like the old Berserker fury of war. He worked for
the love of it, as the children of Starkader fought; and he seemed to
have no more profit of his labour than they of their shedding of blood.
It seemed quite a triumph to get him to bed.
He slept in my room, as I have said, or he was to sleep. But he could
not lay him down till he had analysed the composition of the mattress,
and thrown out suggestions for a new kind of stuffing, to be made of
something that grew wild at the foot of the Peak. In the midst of his
discourse on this point, he fell asleep, as suddenly as though he had
turned himself off at the main. I, too, dropped off in a few minutes,
and I slept soundly for a few hours, until I was awakened, long before
dawn, by the gleam of a candle in my eyes.
He, of course, had lit the candle; and he was sitting upright in bed,
and peering intently, through an eyeglass, at something which he held
betwixt his finger and thumb.
‘See here,’ he said, without any apology for waking me; ‘if that don’t
beat all!’
‘What is it?’ I asked in some alarm.
‘Just the strongest moth you ever saw in your life--pulls like a little
cart-horse. I was lighting-up for a bit of quiet thinking, and in he
buzzed.’
‘Let him go again.’
‘Oh, he can go: I shan’t want him yet,’ and he flung the insect off.
‘Are there many of his sort here, I wonder? We must ask old Forelock,’
so he called our host.
‘What if there are?’
‘See here,’ he said, propping himself up with his pillow, and, to my
dismay, preparing for a long talk. ‘See here: I’ll tell you something;
that insect is undeveloped Power.’
‘Well, what of that?’
‘Can’t you see?’ he asked in a tone expressive of his certainty that I
could not.
I gave him the desired negative, and he went on.
‘That insect means half the motive power in Nature clean thrown away.’
‘I do not follow you, as yet.’
‘I dare say, but you will come to it. How about all the beasts of the
field and the rest of them being created for the service of man?’
‘How about it!’ I was still only half awake.
‘Well, they skulk their work, that’s all. Half of them do nothing for
their keep; do you begin to follow me now?’
‘How should they?’
‘Set them to work; that’s the idea.’
I was wide awake now. It seemed like a disclosure of some new invention
in crime; and, so far, it was appropriate to the midnight hour, the
darkness, and the deadly quiet of the scene.
‘You surely never mean to say that you want to put the song birds into
factories?’
‘That is just what I do mean. It is only a fad of mine at present,
but I shall work it out to something by-and-by. Did you ever see the
performing fleas?’
‘No; it is the only thing I have not seen.’
‘Well, sir, I have, and, from that moment, I was a changed man. It
is a mere toy with the showmen; to a man that can put two and two
together, it is what the fall of the apple was to Newton. The first
time I saw it, I did not sleep for three nights. I went into a dime
show in Broadway, and there were these things, along with a Circassian
lady, and, I believe, a calculating boy. I began with the fleas, and
I never gave another thought to the rest. There were a dozen of them,
of various sizes and nationalities--English fleas, Russian fleas,
American, and so on; and there was a good deal of patter, that meant
nothing, as to what each nationality could do, all winding up, of
course, in honour of the Stars and Stripes. The Russian flea was big,
but lazy; the English flea tough, but obstinate; the American flea
all sprightliness, audacity, energy, and good sense. I soon stopped
that, by making believe I was a Scotchman, when he produced a creature
from its bed of wadding in a pill-box, and said it came from Mull, and
was the smartest thing in his stables. I gave him a dollar, and asked
him not to play the fool, and he fell to business at once. I wanted
to get at the principle of the thing, you understand. The creatures
were harnessed with a woman’s hair--a man’s would have been too
coarse--tied round that dip in their bodies that makes a natural waist.
Then, when you had them fast in this way by one end of the hair, you
put the other end to whatever you wanted to set going--Queen Victoria’s
coach, in cardboard, or the miller’s cart. The flea naturally tried to
get away, and that was your motive power. When you wanted him to turn
the treadmill, you put him up against the wheel, just like his betters
and, the faster he tried to run away, the faster the thing went round.
That was always the principle of it; utilise the movement of flight--a
new escapement beyond anything in the watchmaker’s art. Well, sir, this
showman saw nothing beyond his fleas, but, at a glance, I saw ahead of
them to all animal life. Make the animals earn their living, I said to
myself; work up your reflex action for the benefit of man. It would
solve the labour problem: no more strikes! When once I had got my
thoughts in that groove, I seemed to see nothing but loafing idleness
in all Nature. Take even the working animals; what do many of them do
for Man? There’s nothing serious in beaver dams, for instance, from
that point of view. They are generally a mere obstruction, for want
of an intelligent foreman of the works. And as for the ants, though I
admit they are too small to count in business, why flatter them up?
I say nothing of their useless fighting; but did an ant ever make
anything to eat, or anything to wear? There, sir, when I got that idea
into my head, I couldn’t read the poets, for sheer disgust at the way
in which they wrote about these creatures, and missed the real point.
It was the same when I went to a menagerie, and I always went when I
could. It made me real sad. Think of the waste of power in a cage of
apes! Nothing to be done with them but nut-cracking, and swinging on
the horizontal bar--never tell me!’
He had now settled himself for a long night’s talk, and, all things
considered, I was not loath to find him a listener. There might be
still more in it, I thought, than even he perceived; and, as he had
looked beyond the showman, others, who were not without a lingering
tenderness for a beauty of life fast perishing of the malady of use,
might look beyond him. Besides, now that one was fairly awake, it was
so sweet to feel alive again. For, beyond the gleam of his candle, I
caught a glimpse of the starry sky, and his monotone was sometimes
tempered to the ear by the note of a night bird.
The bird seemed to put him in a rage. ‘Just so! Just so!’ he said with
severity, apostrophising the unseen musician through the open casement.
‘How should you know better, when those who ought to know have been
encouraging you all their lives? Did you ever read a book called “The
Birds of the Poets,” my friend? It is just heart-breaking, if you
take it from the point of view of an employer of labour. All this
singing--why do they do it? Just because there’s nobody to set them to
work. Who does most whistling? The loafer at the street corner. It’s
pent up energy, sir, that must find a vent. That’s why there’s so much
fuss about feathered love-making: they’ve got to kill time. Develop
industry, and you’ll soon have less billing and cooing. Look at Spain
and Italy--why it was nothing but that sort of thing till they went
into manufactures. There ain’t much guitar playing in Catalonia now;
and you’d better not go to Bilbao, if you’ve a taste for the castanets.
Men have got to keep themselves employed; and, if they are not making
cottons, or smelting iron, they’ll be fighting duels, or running off
with one another’s wives. The animal kingdom is full of wasted power,
that’s my point. You can’t use all of it: we haven’t got to that
pitch of intelligence; but you can begin to try. Did you ever notice
a cloud hanging low over the water, not a yard away, and stretching,
perhaps, for miles and miles? What do you think it is? Young shrimps
bounding up and down, just to show they’re glad--millions, billions,
trillions of ’em. There’s power for you, if you could work it up. I
don’t say you could, in this case; I don’t want to be fanciful. I only
say what a fine thing, if you could: let us talk like practical men.
See how the dog has sneaked out of industry. One time he used to earn
his own dinner by roasting his master’s; but that’s all over now. I
don’t say he costs less than the roasting-jack, but I’m talking of
the principle of the thing. What is he now? A machine for licking the
hand of his owner, and for barking when visitors pull the bell. It
ain’t as though he washed your hand--you’ve got to wash it after him,
instead--and if the help is too deaf to hear the bell, she will be too
deaf to hear the dog. The dog is a humbug, and his show of affection
is only a way of fooling us out of a free lunch. What does it amount
to--all this running to and fro after nothing, and all this jumping
about? Sheer waste of power. The Dutchmen and the Esquimaux are the
only wise people; they turn it to account. Put him in harness, and
he’ll soon leave off pawing your pants. As for cats, I am ashamed of
them, and I am more ashamed of the human beings that encourage them
in their profitless ways. In most houses, they don’t even catch the
mice: it’s all done with traps. A pet animal of any kind is an economic
monstrosity. Do you know how I interpret the singing of birds in their
cages? They are sniggering at man to think they have done him out
of their board. There’s a use for everything; why, even tortoises,
if you know how to manage them, will tell you when it’s going to
rain. Sir, I want to make idleness a caution to the whole animal
creation--even a caution to snakes. The bloodhound--send him back into
the Police service, and give him a blue overcoat for uniform, if you
like. There’s power everywhere; why you’ve a perfect sledge hammer in
every alligator’s tail! How about the weight of the hippopotamus for
crushing cane? I’d just turn your Zoological Gardens into a factory,
by thunder I would! and make every blessed animal do something for his
living. No song, no supper. The squirrels would do for thread winders;
the giraffes, for reaching things off shelves. You’d lose by it at
starting, just as you do by prison labour, but you’d soon find out how
to make it pay.’
He seemed to be growing drowsy, but I was wakeful enough, and I wanted
him to go on. My curiosity seemed to gratify him, and he roused himself
for a further effort.
‘You want to begin somewhere, on a small scale--in some place where
there’s nobody to laugh. It’s like any other experiment; you’ll have
to play with it at first, and keep your own counsel. You want a little
place up in a corner; this place would do. Why not this place, eh?’ he
said, sitting bolt upright, and fixing me with the inventor’s eye.
‘You are quiet; you are out of the world; you ain’t of much account in
creation--you know my meaning--and you’ve no character to lose. Just
think of it; one fine day you might send your little specimen of animal
manufactures to a European Exhibition, and then you’d be a second hub
of the universe. What do you do with your goats, for instance? Why
not put ’em into harness? I mean real business, not baby play. How
about a goat tramway from old Forelock’s house there, all along the
Ridge, to the foot of the Point? fare, a potato, if you must carry your
small change about in that way. You are just teeming with life, sir,
and life is power. Your sea birds--it’s a sad sight! I know something
could be done with ’em. Train up a happy family, new style--a happy
factory, the whole lot, cat, and dog, and mouse, and guinea-pig, and
barn-door fowl, all at work, instead of sitting on the mope, and all
turning out something that would sell by the yard. Then lecture on the
utilisation of reflex action all through the States. It would make your
fortune as a show, and when that was played out, you could easily get
up a company to run it as a business concern. You’ve no monkeys, but,
lord, you are rich in sea birds! I can’t bring in the birds yet,’ he
murmured, as another plaintive note of a night watcher sounded from the
outside. ‘I can’t bring in the birds.’
In another instant, he had turned himself off at the main a second
time, and was fast asleep.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A PARAGRAPH.
There was no sleep for me. This seemed the final stroke of treason
against the happiness of sentient life. I had done my best to spoil
humanity’s share of it, till Victoria entered her _caveat_ against the
crime; and here was this sleeping figure, as my logical sequel, with
all animate Nature for his mark.
It was a distressing thought, and I looked round for something to drive
it away. The Captain’s bundle of newspapers lay on a chair, and I took
them up to read myself to sleep.
I might as well have taken coffee as an opiate. As I turned these
fatal leaves, life in all its littleness seemed to beat in upon me,
with a suffocating rush, from every quarter of the globe. I was in the
fever-struck crowd once more, after my spiritual quarantine of months.
It was as a coming back to consciousness after chloroform: my brain
throbbed, every pulsation was pain. I darted from column to column,
from page to page. I had lost the art of selection: one thing was as
another thing, and each impression was a shock. Once again, I realised
Europe and America, Asia and Africa, but only as masses in a whirl. The
Ball itself, with all its continents, seemed to have suddenly whizzed
my way, as I lay dreaming on a cloud in space. Every particle was in
movement, as well as the mass; it was a huge rolling cheese, putrid
with unwholesome being--a low-bred world, not a world at all, a mere
glorified back-court, with all its cheatings, thefts, lies, cruelties,
small cares, and small ambitions, multiplied into themselves, and into
one another, to make a whole. The finer things alone seemed without an
entry, as though, in a business reckoning, such trifles could not count.
I did not know how to read it. Picking and choosing was impossible; I
took it as it came. ‘Brigandage in the public Thoroughfares;’ ‘Foreign
Paupers blocking the City Streets;’ ‘Outrages on English Fishermen;’
‘Parliament--two Members suspended;’ ‘Afghanistan--Five hundred
killed;’ ‘Moonlighting in Ireland; a Policeman’s Head beaten to Pulp;’
‘Evictions--Death of an Old Woman on the Roadside;’ ‘A Hundred People
Burned to Death in a Theatre;’ ‘Brutal Treatment of a Boy.’ This was
from the English budget. The American was more appalling in the cool
devilry of its mocking headlines, as though all the woe and all the
folly of the world were but one stupendous joke--‘Green Immigrants
sold like Cattle;’ ‘Awful Railway Accident; the Line stripped bare
by Speculators, and no Money to Pay for Repairs;’ ‘Mr. Chown’s
Dyspepsia; In the Acquisition of Millions, his Digestion had to go;’
‘A Crank writing a weekly Begging-Letter for Fourteen Years, asking
for $50,000 to start a Newspaper;’ ‘No Holiday for Philadelphia’s
wealthiest Bachelor; Watching his large Interests, and Keeping the
Run of Quotations all through the Hot Spell;’ ‘Mistaken Parsimony
makes the Insane Asylum a Pest Hole of Disease;’ ‘Schevitch voted
an Idiot;’ ‘The last Wrinkle in Thieving;’ ‘Socialists cry “Rats;”’
‘Carbolic Acid isn’t Holy Water;’ ‘The Bulk of the Jewelry melted into
Bars;’ ‘Marvellous Anecdotes of the Altitudinous Aristocracy of Great
Britain;’ ‘Society at Saratoga--another Brilliant Week;’ ‘Prosperity
of the Country; a lady with Thirty-eight Trunks;’ ‘Pa says he likes
Saratoga, because he has a Private Wire to the Stock Exchange.’
And then, suddenly, in one of our own papers, my own name.
‘Henry is altogether inaccurate as to the disappearance of poor Lord
----. He has been missing, or, at any rate, away from home, for nearly
a year, instead of “for the better part of two months.” The family at
---- Court have tried to keep the matter out of the newspapers, and
that, no doubt, is why Henry has not heard of it till now. Others, who
were better informed, kept silent, because they did not wish to cause
unnecessary alarm.’
* * * * *
‘It is certainly true that the shock has been too much for the
poor Dowager-Countess, and that her condition causes the gravest
uneasiness. Lord ---- was her favourite son. It is not true that he
has been heard from only once since he left England. At the outset, he
wrote from Paris, as well as from Genoa.’
* * * * *
‘The Genoa letter was somewhat enigmatical:--“Running away for a
ramble; news when I come back.” This naturally excited the Dowager’s
apprehensions. The police were consulted, somewhat too soon, and they
discovered that he had been seen at Geneva in rather questionable
company. The Dowager immediately jumped to the conclusion that he
had fallen into a Nihilist snare. From that moment, she refused to
believe that he was alive, and, though a subsequent letter bearing his
signature was shown to her, she declined to accept the evidence of his
handwriting.’
* * * * *
‘Henry is doubly wrong in saying that Lord ---- was never heard of
after the Genoa letter. A few weeks ago, direct news of him was
received in a rather extraordinary way. During her late cruise in the
South Seas, H.M.S. “Rollo” touched at one of the Islands (I forget
which), and there, in the best of health and spirits, she found the
missing man. He had fallen under the spell of a native beauty, and,
I believe, was about to get himself tattooed, as a preliminary to
adoption by the tribe. He sent affectionate messages to his family,
but he could not be prevailed upon to make any promise of an immediate
return.’
* * * * *
‘The messages have been communicated to the Dowager, but she persists
in regarding them with incredulity. She is persuaded that Lord ----
fell a victim to foul play at Genoa, or Geneva, and that all these
communications have been forged in his name. Her delusions constitute
the only serious feature of the case. These are the facts, if Henry
will condescend to accept them as such for the benefit of his readers;
and I may further inform him that ---- Court has been shut up.’
CHAPTER XXV.
ANOTHER PARTING.
I dropped the paper, and lay staring at the wall, with aching eyeballs,
till long past dawn. What my thoughts were, need not be told. They were
hardly thoughts; they were only pangs of remorse.
Then, suddenly, I rose, dressed in all haste, saved my paper from the
leafy litter of the night, and went out to find the girl.
I met her, almost on the threshold, fresh from her morning dip in the
sea; and, without greeting, put the paper in her hand--‘Victoria, what
must I do?’
I watched her face as she read, and saw all its glow of youth and
health die suddenly to an ashen cast. There was something so awful in
the change that, without another word, I walked away.
When I returned to the house, the Ancient and the Skipper were alone,
with the remains of their breakfast before them. Victoria, to all
appearance, had served the meal as conscientiously as though nothing
had happened. The old man pressed me to eat, and I broke bread.
‘No one seems to have any appetite this morning but you and me,
Captain,’ he said. ‘I wonder what’s the matter with my girl?’
There was dead silence. I would not answer, and the Captain could
not. He seemed to have an instinctive aversion to situations of that
sort, and he began to resume the conversation which my entrance had
interrupted.
‘Yes, sir, off to-morrow morning; repairs or no repairs. Time’s up.
I’ve betted a hat on this voyage. It’s a go-as-you-please match against
time, for the circumnavigation of the globe. Don’t try to keep me; I
shall lose my hat!’
Victoria entered. If the red had not come back to her cheek, the
sickening white had left. She seemed quite calm.
‘Our guest is going away to-morrow, girl, said the old man. ‘Tell him
how we hate to say good-bye.’
‘Both our guests are going away, my father,’ was Victoria’s reply.
Her stern serenity seemed to preclude debate. I could only look at
her. The old man, speechless, too, for the moment, glanced from one
to the other of us. Even the Captain seemed roused to a perception of
something out of the common.
‘Both going away,’ repeated the Ancient, after a pause. ‘Surely you,
sir----’
‘My father,’ said Victoria gently, ‘I know what I am saying; and our
friend knows it too. He must go. Let us try to thank God that we have
kept him so long.’
‘What’s amiss?’ inquired the old man. ‘What have we done? I’ve always
wanted him to think that he is master here.’
‘Dearest friend!’ I said, taking his honest hand--I could say no more.
‘This is it, my father,’ said the girl, coming to where we sat, and
kissing the old man. ‘Our friend’s life is not our life. He has his own
people, and his people call him. They have been calling to him ever
since he came to us, and last night their voice reached him half way
round the world. The time has come for another parting, that is all.
Sooner or later, all things end that way with us. Our little Island is
the house of parting, and God has made us to live alone.’
‘If I only knew what we had done amiss!’ repeated the foolish old man.
‘Oh, father, won’t you try to understand?’ she said, kissing him
tenderly, again. ‘See what is written here,’ and she gave him the
paper. ‘But you cannot know all it means. I will tell you, if only our
friends will leave us together for a little while.’
We went out. The Captain, feeling the situation beyond him, had fallen
into a watchful silence. I satisfied his natural curiosity in a few
words, as soon as we were outside. I was glad of that relief of speech,
such as it was. There was no relief possible, in utterance, for my
deeper thoughts. I wanted something to rouse me from what seemed a
creeping torpor of death.
It came, as we made our way through the settlement. The child that
had been the herald of my coming was now the herald of my going.
She was Victoria’s favourite, and she had perhaps received a hint
when the girl’s resolution was formed. At any rate, the sprite was
running from house to house, as briskly as on the day of that first
message:--‘Mother, mother! here’s a lord.’ It was that scene again
with a difference--the people trooping out of their cottages, the
women crying, the men pressing forward to wring my hand, and all
asking questions at once in the third person, though they seemed to be
addressed to me; ‘Why is he going? What has happened? How did he get
the message? Oh, his poor mother! Will she ever forgive us? Thirteen
thousand miles away! Make him promise to come back. What will Victoria
do?’ As they talked, others could be seen running towards us from the
distant fields, leaving their work as they got wind of the dire report.
‘Business was suspended’ for the day.
Then the Ancient left his house, and joined the group. He held up his
hand, and they gathered about him in full plebiscitary meeting of the
settlement. ‘Friends,’ he said, ‘we are going to lose a brother. I
hoped to keep him for ever, but Victoria says he must go. I hoped he
would forget the way back, and the home he left behind; but something
has come to remind him of it. Even now I do not well know what it
is, but something has come. The women, I think, will understand it
better than we do. I hoped he would stay with us, and be our guide
and teacher, and let me take my rest. We want a helper to show us
how they do things out in the great world. Some say we are happier
without it--who can tell? We are as children that have never known a
mother’s knee. He could have shown us the way. I must not ask him to
stay: Victoria says he ought to go, and Victoria knows’ (voices, ‘Yes,
Victoria knows’). ‘If I might ask him, I would say, “Take all you want
here--all it is in our power to give--my place, my bit of land----”’
‘Give him the long field under the Ridge!’ cried the voices again;
‘Build a house for him! Make him magistrate next year! Have two
magistrates!’
All turned towards me. I shook my head. The children clustered about
me, crying, and soon, with their treble, was mingled a deeper note
of woe. How shall words paint the misery of that scene? As I had felt
before, so I felt now--a rage of pity for the sorrow that seems to be
our lot in life.
A word or act of power and control was wanting; and it came. Victoria,
tearless, and with the set look on her face that I had caught for an
instant on the day she saved my life at the Cave, stepped into our
midst, and drew the old man aside. After that, not a word was spoken,
and the assembly seemed to melt away.
Victoria had become the leader of the settlement; no one seemed to
question her commands. They were not commands so much as imperious
wishes which all divined. It was understood that the Captain was to
give me passage to Europe; he was never asked to do it. Still less,
was I asked if I would take the passage. Victoria pushed forward my
departure with an energy, controlling and controlled, worthy of a
crisis of battle. She stood on the beach while the whale boat laboured
to and fro betwixt ship and shore to complete our exchange of stores
with the American. The presents of the Islanders to me made the better
part of an entire load. I had brought nothing to the Island but the
clothes in which I stood upright, and a roll of paper money which the
Ancient had always refused to diminish by the substance of a single
note. The money had not been useless, for all that. It had enabled
me to make some purchases, to repair my outfit, on the coming of the
Queen’s ship, and now it procured from the crew of the trader a few
presents for my generous hosts.
The excitement of these preparations helped to suspend the anguish of
parting. But, at nightfall, this returned with cruel force, when the
people gathered on the moonlit green, to sing me their simple songs of
farewell. It was the whole settlement, save one: Victoria was not to
be found. They came with cheerful faces: the sorrow of the morning, I
knew, would be renewed in due season, but their natures lived ever in
the moment as it passed. The children prattled and played; and, in the
murmur of talk among their elders, there was no note of woe. Under the
shining sun, it might have been a scene of joy; and, if the moonlight
touched it into sadness, this was but a spiritual association of
ideas. They sang all that they thought would please me, all that I had
ever liked--the joyous songs, of course, in preference. All were sad
songs to me. At last, with slow and measured cadence, their perfect
voices rising in the perfect night, they began the one I had always
loved most. It was a song of parting and of death, with the burden,
‘When I am gone--when I am gone.’
Before the second stanza was over, I had stolen from my place in the
shadow, with such a passion of sorrow stirring to the very depths of my
being, as I had never known in all my life.
CHAPTER XXVI.
AN EXPLANATION.
I walked away in unutterable despondency, relieved only by one purpose,
one hope--to find Victoria. I had not far to go to seek her: her
statuesque form was outlined against the clear sky above the Peak.
She turned to greet me with a grave smile.
‘You came away before it was over; I was wiser than you, I came away
before it began. I suppose it is because we are wild people that we
make such a ceremony of saying “Good-bye.” Before they taught us to be
Christians, you know, we used to make just the same fuss about death.’
‘Is it good-bye, Victoria? I hardly know what it is. It looks like
dismissal, without a word of leave-taking. You seem to have sent me
away.’
‘I _have_ sent you away,’ she said, her voice trembling a little, and
then instantly recovering its tone. ‘Yes, I want always to be able to
feel that I told you, when the time had come, to go.’
A pang shot through my heart that was not regret, but a sort of jealous
rage.
‘You are a great observer of times and seasons, Victoria. Perhaps, even
now, I have lingered too long.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, with the note deeper, richer than before, but no
less firm. Then she added, as though to make her meaning more clear:
‘If there were all the reasons in the world for keeping you, dearest
friend, you must still go, to save your mother’s life. You feel the
force of that reason as much as I do. Why seek for more?’
‘That reason, from myself to myself, Victoria, may be enough. It is not
enough from you to me.’
‘From me to you then,’ she said; ‘will this do? All things leave us, as
we stand here in this Isle; all things pass us by. Whatever comes to
us, as surely goes. Why should we hope to keep it, when that must be
the end? God has marked us out for solitude: let us bow to God’s will.
Nothing could keep you here: it is written. Nothing has kept others.’
The pang that had almost ceased darted through me again with its full
force, at these last words. ‘Cold, cruel heart!’ I said in a fury of
pain, ‘you have never cared to keep me. Why had you not pity enough to
let me die, when the waves tossed me here?’
She gave me one glance, of which I could not catch the full expression
in the uncertain light, straightened herself, folded her hands behind
her, and turned her face towards the sea.
The wrathful agony of my feelings endured even under this rebuke, much
as I felt I deserved it. I was distinctly aware that I was playing a
pitiful part before her, and distinctly unable to help playing it.
The torment of losing her, of being nothing to her, overpowered every
finer feeling: and the more I felt the degradation of my violence, the
more desperate the violence seemed to become. I felt only the goading
of the pain of loss, and, forgetting all my fine resolves to treat her
with the disdain with which I thought she was treating me, I caught her
in my arms and covered her lips, her eyes, her brow, with passionate
kisses, till she sank for support upon a jutting stone. It was no timid
first kiss of pastoral flirtation, but twenty, following as quick
on one another as a rain of angry blows. There was a sort of anger
in them, as well as love. I seemed to feel that I had been made the
sport of her innocence. What had I not lost by trying to outdo her in
tenderness, in generosity, and reserve? So I interpret my feelings now:
at the moment, nothing could have been more devoid of conscious motive
than the madness of this act. The brute that is in each of us, and
that is only half held in check by laws, observances, and uses, seemed
suddenly to have slipped his chain.
Yet, if the act was a surprise to me, in itself, it was a greater
surprise in its effect upon Victoria. The girl seemed to sink down,
from sheer want of the power of resistance. The lips parted, without
word or sound, but the eyes met the fierce gaze of mine with infinite
tenderness; and, when she did speak, this was what I heard:
‘Oh, I love you, I love you--better than my own life: and I will never
have you love me: and to-morrow you shall go away from me for ever.’
The thing had been said, and there was no unsaying it. In vain,
Victoria, resuming her self-control almost as quickly as she had lost
it, disengaged herself from my arms, which had sought her beautiful
shape.
She sat silent, in what I could not but feel was a silence of shame.
For the moment, I was silent too. We were both, in a manner, stunned
by the shock of that avowal. Victoria had said what she meant never to
say: I had heard what I never hoped to hear. If I had expectation of
anything--though, indeed, I think I had none--it was rather of anger
and fierce repulse.
I was the first to recover speech, if not self-possession. I took her
hand: thank Heaven I had enough sense and feeling left not to claim
her lips on the strength of what had just passed. I tried to tell her
something of what I had wanted to tell her all this weary time--how
my love for her had come, first, through the divine suggestion of her
shape, and voice, and ways, and how her soul had completed what they
had begun, and turned enchantment into one of the laws of being.
She listened, and soon, as I could see, no longer with shame. The hand
I held returned the pressure of my own, and I felt the thrilling touch
of the other on my brow and hair.
She spoke at last. ‘Listen, dear friend: now all must be said. It is
too late to blame you for what has happened, or even to blame myself
for letting it happen. It was to be. No human soul could be angry that
knew how I tried, not even----’
I would not let her utter the name. ‘Never speak of him. What can he be
to you? What fate does he deserve?’ but she laid her finger on my lips.
‘I know; my heart is yours, but only he shall release my hand.’
‘Victoria!’
‘Oh! listen, listen, and be still! I know all that must be said, and
all that must be done.
‘When you first came, my heart was his, or I thought it was. I thought
it had gone out with him into the world--your world, or the next
one, they are both just as far away from us. I don’t know what I felt
about you, except that I felt what was good and true and right. Was it
wrong to like you? How can anyone help liking you that knows you? You
spoke to me as no one had spoken to me before. You seemed to know all
things. I only wanted to listen to you, and still be true to him. All
my hope of myself was in being true. Our people do not always know what
that sort of truth is. There are the two strains in our blood; we are
English, and something else. It has shocked me, from my girlhood up, to
see how we sometimes forget. We feel so quickly; and all our feeling
is in each terrible moment as it flies. I set myself above our people;
I shuddered to think I should ever be like that. My love was part of
my respect for myself. Half our women have had their love tokens taken
away in Queen’s ships, and have still lived on to be wives and mothers
in the Isle. I could not, I would not be like that.
‘I did not blame then; I pitied! It is all so splendid when the Queen’s
ships come. The young men in them seem to have dropped from the sky.
It is like the book of the Heathen mythology, with the gods coming down.
‘When I saw you, I did not know it was to be like that. I felt sure of
myself, and, if I had doubted, still I should have felt sure of you.
Then slowly, slowly, slowly, came the dreadful change, though, if you
had not spoken that day, I might never have known that it had come.
When I did know, still it did not seem to be too late. My pride was
strong: I did not know the strength of my weakness. I went there every
day--to the thicket, and prayed to have him sent back to me. I tried
to shut you quite out from my heart, but still to keep you in my soul.
You were so good; you made me think I had done it. You tried to make me
think so; I knew you tried; and your very goodness only made it worse
and worse.
‘Then, I felt I was no longer sure of myself. I tried to keep away from
you; but, to have you near me, and not to see you, not to speak to you,
made all the world seem dead and cold. So, I always came back to find
you again, of my own accord, wanting to keep all my happiness, when I
ought to have chosen which part of it I should give up.’
‘Victoria, if only I had known; if only I had understood!’
‘Oh, how dreadful, if you thought me light-minded, playing you off
and on. All that I wanted was to like you as much as I dared, without
having you like me more than you ought. I should have done, what I see
now I must do--send you away, for both our sakes. If I did not see it
at once, pity, dear friend, pity, and forgive!
‘Then, I prayed again for help; and see how the help has come! We might
both of us have been too weak for that sacrifice, but now it is laid
upon us without our wills. You must go.’
‘I will come back, come to claim you, my Victoria, to bring you your
word of release, to take you, whether you will or no.’
‘You will never come back,’ she said in a tone that seemed to be beyond
both hope and despair, and she held my face up to the light and looked
down into it with tender yet tearless eyes. ‘You ought not to come
back: your place is in the great world--poor little great world! Try
to think there is something nobler than love for one--pity for all. Go;
and live for those poor people you have talked about to me.’
‘I am not equal to it: I could only die for them, at best.’
‘Still--I know what I am saying--others must claim you: your
station----’
‘O Victoria, is your opinion of me so low? Do you send me back to
resume the “English gentleman”; and to hide my shame in being nothing
in the smug proprieties of that poor creature’s lot?’
‘I do not know, dear friend, but this I feel--we must lose you for
ever: no one returns here.’
‘Then let me never go away,’ I cried, rising, and clasping her again to
my heart. ‘Let me love you, and be with you for ever, and forget all
the world beside.’
Once more I saw a beginning of that exquisite languor which had almost
made her mine. The lips of the beautiful creature parted, but only in
sighs; the eyes closed. Once more, too, my own lips approached them,
when the girl roused herself, by some mysterious exertion of will,
tore herself from my embrace, and ran to the very edge of the cliff.
‘Deep into the deep sea, beloved one, for ever beloved of my heart,
if you come one step more! Go now, go from me, and leave me to say my
prayers. I love you; take that last word from Victoria; you will never
hear her voice again.’
‘She shall hear mine. After such a last word, my Victoria, there must
be more. If you could have told me I was nothing to you, I would have
gone for ever; now, Death alone shall part you and me. Go, I must,
for a season, but your blessed promise, for promise it is, makes it
almost easy to say farewell. Be sure of this, I will come back to claim
you, from the other side of the world. I will leave you now, since my
presence troubles you; I will even set sail without trying to speak to
you again. But, before I go, you _shall_ give me a sign or a token--a
token of submission, my Victoria, I claim no less, a sign that you have
conquered your foolish superstition of fidelity, and your cruel pride.’
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE PROMISE OF THE SKIES.
I had no room-fellow that night. The Captain had gone on board, to
sleep, leaving word that he would fire his signal-gun very early in the
morning. I should have been ready for it, if it had come at dawn.
The day was but just breaking, when I heard someone stirring in the
next room. I ran in, with I know not what wild hope, but only to find
the old man.
He was standing near the recess that formed her bed-chamber, with the
sliding panel in his hand, and staring helplessly at the empty bed. It
had not been used that night.
The glance he turned on me was enough; I did not wait for his words,
but rushed out of the house.
That horror, thank God, was a false alarm. The child who was her
favourite was running towards our cottage with a message that should
have been delivered the night before. She had passed the night under a
neighbour’s roof.
As I hurried back with the news to the old man, I heard the signal gun.
A week has passed, yet I cannot clearly recall what followed. I am
dimly aware of a last look at the cottage and the settlement, of a
crowd of weeping villagers, of the grasp of the Ancient’s hand. There
is an almost absolute void of perception between the boat at the
landing-stage, and the ship, with her solitary passenger, flying at
full speed from the shore. Active consciousness seems to have been
suspended between these two decisive facts. Memory is resumed, with one
ineffaceable impression that it must hold for life--Victoria stretching
her arms towards the ship, from the summit of the Peak. As she stood
there, with her background of fleecy cloud, she seemed rather of heaven
than of earth, and her gesture was a promise of the skies. Then, I knew
that it was well with me; and I turned my face from the Island with a
joyful heart.
_Spottiswoode & Co. Printers, New-street Square, London._
Transcriber’s Notes
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Small capitals are changed to all capitals.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected
after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and
consultation of external sources. Except for those changes noted below,
all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have
been retained.
The following corrections have been applied to the text (before/after):
(p. 6)
... and to night’s snug Company ...
... and to-night’s snug Company ...
(p. 63)
... down Bond Srteet, and ...
... down Bond Street, and ...
(p. 64)
... its spiritual charm,
... its spiritual charm.
(p. 100)
... forth in mod st pride ...
... forth in modest pride ...
(p. 156)
... with al the deep liquid ...
... with all the deep liquid ...
(p. 164)
... of the farmyard, or after ...
... of the farm-yard, or after ...
(p. 188)
... had subse quently removed ...
... had subsequently removed ...
(p. 197)
... in the same way?’
... in the same way?”
(p. 214)
... at the school-house, followed ...
... at the schoolhouse, followed ...
(p. 251)
... few hours,until I ...
... few hours, until I ...
(p. 257)
... just heartbreaking, if you ...
... just heart-breaking, if you ...
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