nation moved him so much more strongly than his own. His voice already
had a different ring, his eyes a different look. He eagerly leaned
forward, and his long, straight backbone looked longer and straighter
than ever. He was less the ghost of a man. A faint flush even had come
into his pale cheeks, and he moved his well-kept hands emphatically.
“Oh, yes!” he said: “The country is going to the dogs, right enough;
but you can't get them to see it. They go on sapping and sapping the
independence of the people. If the working man's to be looked after,
whatever he does—what on earth's to become of his go, and foresight, and
perseverance?”
In his rising voice a certain piquancy was left to its accent of the
ruling class by that faint twang, which came, I remembered, from some
slight defect in his tonsils.
“Mark my words! So long as we're on these lines, we shall do nothing.
It's going against evolution. They say Darwin's getting old-fashioned;
all I know is, he's good enough for me. Competition is the only thing.”
“But competition,” I said, “is bitter cruel, and some people can't stand
against it!” And I looked at him rather hard: “Do you object to putting
any sort of floor under the feet of people like that?”
He let his voice drop a little, as if in deference to my scruples.
“Ah!” he said; “but if you once begin this sort of thing, there's no end
to it. It's so insidious. The more they have, the more they want; and
all the time they're losing fighting power. I've thought pretty deeply
about this. It's shortsighted; it really doesn't do!”
“But,” I said, “surely you're not against saving people from being
knocked out of time by old age, and accidents like illness, and the
fluctuations of trade?”
“Oh!” he said, “I'm not a bit against charity. Aunt Emma's splendid
about that. And Claud's awfully good. I do what I can, myself.” He
looked at me, so queerly deprecating, that I quite liked him at that
moment. At heart—I felt he was a good fellow. “All I think is,” he went
on, “that to give them something that they can rely on as a matter
of course, apart from their own exertions, is the wrong principle
altogether,” and suddenly his voice began to rise again, and his eyes to
stare. “I'm convinced that all this doing things for other people, and
bolstering up the weak, is rotten. It stands to reason that it must be.”
He had risen to his feet, so preoccupied with the wrongness of that
principle that he seemed to have forgotten my presence. And as he stood
there in the window the light was too strong for him. All the thin
incapacity of that shadowy figure was pitilessly displayed; the
desperate narrowness in that long, pale face; the wambling look of those
pale, well-kept hands—all that made him such a ghost of a man. But his
nasal, dogmatic voice rose and rose.
“There's nothing for it but bracing up! We must cut away all this
State support; we must teach them to rely on themselves. It's all sheer
pauperisation.”
And suddenly there shot through me the fear that he might burst one of
those little blue veins in his pale forehead, so vehement had he become;
and hastily I changed the subject.
“Do you like living up there with your aunt?” I asked: “Isn't it a bit
quiet?”
He turned, as if I had awakened him from a dream.
“Oh, well!” he said, “it's only till I get this job.”
“Let me see—how long is it since you——?”
“Four years. She's very glad to have me, of course.”
“And how's your brother Claud?”
“Oh! All right, thanks; a bit worried with the estate. The poor old
gov'nor left it in rather a mess, you know.”
“Ah! Yes. Does he do other work?”
“Oh! Always busy in the parish.”
“And your brother Richard?”
“He's all right. Came home this year. Got just enough to live on, with
his pension—hasn't saved a rap, of course.”
“And Willie? Is he still delicate?”
“Yes.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Easy job, his, you know. And even if his health does give out, his
college pals will always find him some sort of sinecure. So jolly
popular, old Willie!”
“And Alan? I haven't heard anything of him since his Peruvian thing came
to grief. He married, didn't he?”
“Rather! One of the Burleys. Nice girl—heiress; lot of property in
Hampshire. He looks after it for her now.”
“Doesn't do anything else, I suppose?”
“Keeps up his antiquarianism.”
I had exhausted the members of his family.
Then, as though by eliciting the good fortunes of his brothers I had
cast some slur upon himself, he said suddenly: “If the railway had come,
as it ought to have, while I was out there, I should have done quite
well with my fruit farm.”
“Of course,” I agreed; “it was bad luck. But after all, you're sure to
get a job soon, and—so long as you can live up there with your aunt—you
can afford to wait, and not bother.”
“Yes,” he murmured. And I got up.
“Well, it's been very jolly to hear about you all!”
He followed me out.
“Awfully glad, old man,” he said, “to have seen you, and had this talk.
I was feeling rather low. Waiting to know whether I get that job—it's
not lively.”
He came down the Club steps with me. By the door of my cab a loafer was
standing; a tall tatterdemalion with a pale, bearded face. My distant
relative fended him away, and leaning through the window, murmured:
“Awful lot of these chaps about now!”
For the life of me I could not help looking at him very straight. But no
flicker of apprehension crossed his face.
“Well, good-by again!” he said: “You've cheered me up a lot!”
I glanced back from my moving cab. Some monetary transaction was passing
between him and the loafer, but, short-sighted as I am, I found it
difficult to decide which of those tall, pale, bearded figures was
giving the other one a penny. And by some strange freak an awful vision
shot up before me—of myself, and my distant relative, and Claud, and
Richard, and Willie, and Alan, all suddenly relying on ourselves. I took
out my handkerchief to mop my brow; but a thought struck me, and I put
it back. Was it possible for me, and my distant relatives, and their
distant relatives, and so on to infinity of those who be longed to a
class provided by birth with a certain position, raised by Providence
on to a platform made up of money inherited, of interest, of education
fitting us for certain privileged pursuits, of friends similarly
endowed, of substantial homes, and substantial relatives of some sort or
other, on whom we could fall back—was it possible for any of us ever
to be in the position of having to rely absolutely on ourselves? For
several minutes I pondered that question; and slowly I came to the
conclusion that, short of crime, or that unlikely event, marooning, it
was not possible. Never, never—try as we might—could any single one
of us be quite in the position of one of those whose approaching
pauperisation my distant relative had so vehemently deplored. We were
already pauperised. If we served our country, we were pensioned.... If
we inherited land, it could not be taken from us. If we went into the
Church, we were there for life, whether we were suitable or no. If we
attempted the more hazardous occupations of the law, medicine, the
arts, or business, there were always those homes, those relations, those
friends of ours to fall back on, if we failed. No! We could never have
to rely entirely on ourselves; we could never be pauperised more than we
were already! And a light burst in on me. That explained why my distant
relative felt so keenly. It bit him, for he saw, of course, how
dreadful it would be for these poor people of the working classes when
legislation had succeeded in placing them in the humiliating position
in which we already were—the dreadful position of having something to
depend on apart from our own exertions, some sort of security in our
lives. I saw it now. It was his secret pride, gnawing at him all the
time, that made him so rabid on the point. He was longing, doubtless,
day and night, not to have had a father who had land, and had left a
sister well enough off to keep him while he was waiting for his job.
He must be feeling how horribly degrading was the position of Claud
—inheriting that land; and of Richard, who, just because he had served
in the Indian Civil Service, had got to live on a pension all the rest
of his days; and of Willie, who was in danger at any moment, if his
health—always delicate—gave out, of having a sinecure found for him by
his college friends; and of Alan, whose educated charm had enabled him
to marry an heiress and live by managing her estates. All, all sapped of
go and foresight and perseverance by a cruel Providence! That was what
he was really feeling, and concealing, be cause he was too well-bred to
show his secret grief. And I felt suddenly quite warm toward him, now
that I saw how he was suffering. I understood how bound he felt in
honour to combat with all his force this attempt to place others in
his own distressing situation. At the same time I was honest enough to
confess to myself sitting there in the cab—that I did not personally
share that pride of his, or feel that I was being rotted by my own
position; I even felt some dim gratitude that if my powers gave out
at any time, and I had not saved anything, I should still not be left
destitute to face the prospect of a bleak and impoverished old age; and
I could not help a weak pleasure in the thought that a certain relative
security was being guaranteed to those people of the working classes
who had never had it before. At the same moment I quite saw that to a
prouder and stronger heart it must indeed be bitter to have to sit still
under your own security, and even more bitter to have to watch that
pauperising security coming closer and closer to others—for the generous
soul is always more concerned for others than for himself. No doubt,
I thought, if truth were known, my distant relative is consumed with
longing to change places with that loafer who tried to open the door
of my cab—for surely he must see, as I do, that that is just what
he himself—having failed to stand the pressure of competition in his
life—would be doing if it were not for the accident of his birth, which
has so lamentably insured him against coming to that.
“Yes,” I thought, “you have learnt something to-day; it does not do, you
see, hastily to despise those distant relatives of yours, who talk about
pauperising and molly-coddling the lower classes. No, no! One must look
deeper than that! One must have generosity!”
And with that I stopped the cab and got out for I wanted a breath of
air.
1911
THE BLACK GODMOTHER
Sitting out on the lawn at tea with our friend and his retriever, we
had been discussing those massacres of the helpless which had of late
occurred, and wondering that they should have been committed by the
soldiery of so civilised a State, when, in a momentary pause of our
astonishment, our friend, who had been listening in silence, crumpling
the drooping soft ear of his dog, looked up and said, “The cause of
atrocities is generally the violence of Fear. Panic's at the back of
most crimes and follies.”
Knowing that his philosophical statements were always the result of
concrete instance, and that he would not tell us what that instance was
if we asked him—such being his nature—we were careful not to agree.
He gave us a look out of those eyes of his, so like the eyes of a mild
eagle, and said abruptly: “What do you say to this, then? . . . I was
out in the dog-days last year with this fellow of mine, looking for
Osmunda, and stayed some days in a village—never mind the name. Coming
back one evening from my tramp, I saw some boys stoning a mealy-coloured
dog. I went up and told the young devils to stop it. They only looked
at me in the injured way boys do, and one of them called out, 'It's mad,
guv'nor!' I told them to clear off, and they took to their heels. The
dog followed me. It was a young, leggy, mild looking mongrel, cross—I
should say—between a brown retriever and an Irish terrier. There was
froth about its lips, and its eyes were watery; it looked indeed as if
it might be in distemper. I was afraid of infection for this fellow of
mine, and whenever it came too close shooed it away, till at last it
slunk off altogether. Well, about nine o'clock, when I was settling down
to write by the open window of my sitting-room—still daylight, and very
quiet and warm—there began that most maddening sound, the barking of an
unhappy dog. I could do nothing with that continual 'Yap yap!' going on,
and it was too hot to shut the window; so I went out to see if I could
stop it. The men were all at the pub, and the women just finished with
their gossip; there was no sound at all but the continual barking of
this dog, somewhere away out in the fields. I travelled by ear across
three meadows, till I came on a hay-stack by a pool of water. There was
the dog sure enough—the same mealy-coloured mongrel, tied to a stake,
yapping, and making frantic little runs on a bit of rusty chain;
whirling round and round the stake, then standing quite still, and
shivering. I went up and spoke to it, but it backed into the hay-stack,
and there it stayed shrinking away from me, with its tongue hanging out.
It had been heavily struck by something on the head; the cheek was cut,
one eye half-closed, and an ear badly swollen. I tried to get hold of
it, but the poor thing was beside itself with fear. It snapped and flew
round so that I had to give it up, and sit down with this fellow here
beside me, to try and quiet it—a strange dog, you know, will generally
form his estimate of you from the way it sees you treat another dog. I
had to sit there quite half an hour before it would let me go up to it,
pull the stake out, and lead it away. The poor beast, though it was so
feeble from the blows it had received, was still half-frantic, and I
didn't dare to touch it; and all the time I took good care that this
fellow here didn't come too near. Then came the question what was to be
done. There was no vet, of course, and I'd no place to put it except my
sitting-room, which didn't belong to me. But, looking at its battered
head, and its half-mad eyes, I thought: 'No trusting you with these
bumpkins; you'll have to come in here for the night!' Well, I got it in,
and heaped two or three of those hairy little red rugs landladies are
so fond of, up in a corner; and got it on to them, and put down my bread
and milk. But it wouldn't eat—its sense of proportion was all gone,
fairly destroyed by terror. It lay there moaning, and every now and then
it raised its head with a 'yap' of sheer fright, dreadful to hear, and
bit the air, as if its enemies were on it again; and this fellow of mine
lay in the opposite corner, with his head on his paw, watching it. I sat
up for a long time with that poor beast, sick enough, and wondering how
it had come to be stoned and kicked and battered into this state; and
next day I made it my business to find out.”
Our friend paused, scanned us a little angrily, and then went on: “It
had made its first appearance, it seems, following a bicyclist. There
are men, you know—save the mark—who, when their beasts get ill or too
expensive, jump on their bicycles and take them for a quick run, taking
care never to look behind them. When they get back home they say:
'Hallo! where's Fido?' Fido is nowhere, and there's an end! Well, this
poor puppy gave up just as it got to our village; and, roaming shout
in search of water, attached itself to a farm labourer. The man with
excellent intentions—as he told me himself —tried to take hold of it,
but too abruptly, so that it was startled, and snapped at him. Whereon
he kicked it for a dangerous cur, and it went drifting back toward the
village, and fell in with the boys coming home from school. It thought,
no doubt, that they were going to kick it too, and nipped one of them
who took it by the collar. Thereupon they hullabalooed and stoned it
down the road to where I found them. Then I put in my little bit of
torture, and drove it away, through fear of infection to my own dog.
After that it seems to have fallen in with a man who told me: 'Well,
you see, he came sneakin' round my house, with the children playin', and
snapped at them when they went to stroke him, so that they came running
in to their mother, an' she' called to me in a fine takin' about a mad
dog. I ran out with a shovel and gave 'im one, and drove him out. I'm
sorry if he wasn't mad, he looked it right enough; you can't be
too careful with strange dogs.' Its next acquaintance was an old
stone-breaker, a very decent sort. 'Well! you see,' the old man
explained to me, 'the dog came smellin' round my stones, an' it wouldn'
come near, an' it wouldn' go away; it was all froth and blood about the
jaw, and its eyes glared green at me. I thought to meself, bein' the
dog-days—I don't like the look o' you, you look funny! So I took a
stone, an' got it here, just on the ear; an' it fell over. And I thought
to meself: Well, you've got to finish it, or it'll go bitin' somebody,
for sure! But when I come to it with my hammer, the dog it got up—an'
you know how it is when there's somethin' you've 'alf killed, and you
feel sorry, and yet you feel you must finish it, an' you hit at it
blind, you hit at it agen an' agen. The poor thing, it wriggled and
snapped, an' I was terrified it'd bite me, an' some'ow it got away.”'
Again our friend paused, and this time we dared not look at him.
“The next hospitality it was shown,” he went on presently, “was by a
farmer, who, seeing it all bloody, drove it off, thinking it had been
digging up a lamb that he'd just buried. The poor homeless beast came
sneaking back, so he told his men to get rid of it. Well, they got hold
of it somehow—there was a hole in its neck that looked as if they'd used
a pitchfork—and, mortally afraid of its biting them, but not liking, as
they told me, to drown it, for fear the owner might come on them, they
got a stake and a chain, and fastened it up, and left it in the water
by the hay-stack where I found it. I had some conversation with that
farmer. 'That's right,' he said, 'but who was to know? I couldn't have
my sheep worried. The brute had blood on his muzzle. These curs do a
lot of harm when they've once been blooded. You can't run risks.”' Our
friend cut viciously at a dandelion with his stick. “Run risks!” he
broke out suddenly: “That was it from beginning to end of that poor
beast's sufferings, fear! From that fellow on the bicycle, afraid of the
worry and expense, as soon as it showed signs of distemper, to myself
and the man with the pitch fork—not one of us, I daresay, would have
gone out of our way to do it—a harm. But we felt fear, and so by the law
of self-preservation, or what ever you like—it all began, till there the
poor thing was, with a battered head and a hole in its neck, ravenous
with hunger, and too distraught even to lap my bread and milk. Yes, and
there's something uncanny about a suffering animal—we sat watching it,
and again we were afraid, looking at its eyes and the way it bit the
air. Fear! It's the black godmother of all damnable things!”
Our friend bent down, crumpling and crumpling at his dog's ears. We,
too, gazed at the ground, thinking of, that poor lost puppy, and the
horrible inevitability of all that happens, seeing men are what they
are; thinking of all the foul doings in the world, whose black godmother
is Fear.
“And what became of the poor dog?” one of us asked at last.
“When,” said our friend slowly, “I'd had my fill of watching, I covered
it with a rug, took this fellow away with me, and went to bed. There was
nothing else to do. At dawn I was awakened by three dreadful cries—not
like a dog's at all. I hurried down. There was the poor beast—wriggled
out from under the rug-stretched on its side, dead. This fellow of mine
had followed me in, and he went and sat down by the body. When I spoke
to him he just looked round, and wagged his tail along the ground,
but would not come away; and there he sat till it was buried, very
interested, but not sorry at all.”
Our friend was silent, looking angrily at something in the distance.
And we, too, were silent, seeing in spirit that vigil of early morning:
The thin, lifeless, sandy-coloured body, stretched on those red mats;
and this black creature—now lying at our feet—propped on its haunches
like the dog in “The Death of Procris,” patient, curious, ungrieved,
staring down at it with his bright, interested eyes.
1912.
CONCERNING LIFE
QUALITY
I knew him from the days of my extreme youth, because he made my
father's boots; inhabiting with his elder brother two little shops let
into one, in a small by-street-now no more, but then most fashionably
placed in the West End.
That tenement had a certain quiet distinction; there was no sign upon
its face that he made for any of the Royal Family—merely his own German
name of Gessler Brothers; and in the window a few pairs of boots. I
remember that it always troubled me to account for those unvarying boots
in the window, for he made only what was ordered, reaching nothing down,
and it seemed so inconceivable that what he made could ever have
failed to fit. Had he bought them to put there? That, too, seemed
inconceivable. He would never have tolerated in his house leather on
which he had not worked himself. Besides, they were too beautiful—the
pair of pumps, so inexpressibly slim, the patent leathers with cloth
tops, making water come into one's mouth, the tall brown riding boots
with marvellous sooty glow, as if, though new, they had been worn a
hundred years. Those pairs could only have been made by one who saw
before him the Soul of Boot—so truly were they prototypes incarnating
the very spirit of all foot-gear. These thoughts, of course, came to
me later, though even when I was promoted to him, at the age of perhaps
fourteen, some inkling haunted me of the dignity of himself and brother.
For to make boots—such boots as he made—seemed to me then, and still
seems to me, mysterious and wonderful.
I remember well my shy remark, one day, while stretching out to him my
youthful foot:
“Isn't it awfully hard to do, Mr. Gessler?”
And his answer, given with a sudden smile from out of the sardonic
redness of his beard: “Id is an Ardt!”
Himself, he was a little as if made from leather, with his yellow
crinkly face, and crinkly reddish hair and beard; and neat folds
slanting down his cheeks to the corners of his mouth, and his guttural
and one-toned voice; for leather is a sardonic substance, and stiff and
slow of purpose. And that was the character of his face, save that
his eyes, which were grey-blue, had in them the simple gravity of one
secretly possessed by the Ideal. His elder brother was so very like
him—though watery, paler in every way, with a great industry—that
sometimes in early days I was not quite sure of him until the interview
was over. Then I knew that it was he, if the words, “I will ask my
brudder,” had not been spoken; and that, if they had, it was his elder
brother.
When one grew old and wild and ran up bills, one somehow never ran them
up with Gessler Brothers. It would not have seemed becoming to go in
there and stretch out one's foot to that blue iron-spectacled glance,
owing him for more than—say—two pairs, just the comfortable reassurance
that one was still his client.
For it was not possible to go to him very often—his boots lasted
terribly, having something beyond the temporary—some, as it were,
essence of boot stitched into them.
One went in, not as into most shops, in the mood of: “Please serve me,
and let me go!” but restfully, as one enters a church; and, sitting on
the single wooden chair, waited—for there was never anybody there.
Soon, over the top edge of that sort of well—rather dark, and smelling
soothingly of leather—which formed the shop, there would be seen his
face, or that of his elder brother, peering down. A guttural sound, and
the tip-tap of bast slippers beating the narrow wooden stairs, and he
would stand before one without coat, a little bent, in leather apron,
with sleeves turned back, blinking—as if awakened from some dream
of boots, or like an owl surprised in daylight and annoyed at this
interruption.
And I would say: “How do you do, Mr. Gessler? Could you make me a pair
of Russia leather boots?”