was but little help to her or to us. As for My Lord's children, though
they could not understand the case, they saw that something great and
terrible was at hand. But all this should not be detailed to Your
Excellency, nor can my pen properly express it. My Lady and her servant
and the two children were taken, I think, from the room, but I did not
look, nor did I hear any sound except a slight sobbing, which very
soon ceased: the passing of men-at-arms set at regular places without
I remember to hear continuing, and if it be a trivial matter to have
this set down for Your Excellency, I do so only in the desire to relate
every particular and to omit nothing. I asked My Lord whether there was
anything that I could further communicate to the King or to his family,
or to any one. He answered in a firm voice that he had attended to
all. And he gave me a letter sealed (for this was now permitted him),
which letter I am to deliver to Your Excellency and will do so, since
I must entrust it to no one. He told me further that he had made his
peace and that he had received Communion, but that he would beg the
priest whom Your Excellency had sent to remain with him to the end. The
Warden of the Castle, a man of strict purpose, but not harsh in his
demeanour (though silent, as are the most of these people), said here
that the populace, who had gathered in a great crowd, might be angered
at the sight of a priest, which sight indeed would recall in them
all the circumstances of the war. To this My Lord answered, a little
disdainfully I thought, that it was but little to ask, and that for the
anger of the people, and indeed for any feeling they might have towards
himself, he had no care of it. He did not desire to arouse it, nor did
he fear it. Then said the Warden of the Castle, he might be accompanied
as he wished, but the priest must put off his gown: which he did and
stood dressed like any common man of this country, or rather like some
servant. But his hair and the trim of his beard seemed the more foreign
in such a habit.
The sun had now risen, and we were apprised that My Lord's hour had
come by the beating of drums outside the castle and the noise of the
people. My Lord hearing this looked at me sorrowfully for a little time
and asked me a question in the matter of religion which I thought both
terrible and confusing at such a time, but he pressed me and I replied
very humbly that for my part I had lived as most men lived in these
times, which are corrupt and evil, and that indeed no man could fully
understand the unseen things; no, nor so much as conceive them; but
that none the less I hoped I might always bear witness to the Faith as
did he at that very moment. To which My Lord answered, sighing, "I bear
no witness to that, but only to my constancy, and I could wish that
they had left me my sword."
I set down for Your Excellency all that happened, but I would not have
Your Excellency think that My Lord was troubled in these matters; only
it was his custom to debate learning and philosophy and to express
doubts that he might hear them answered: this was all. And it is truly
said that a man's custom will be seen expressed in the end of his life.
Meanwhile they were waiting for us, and as I was to be the other that
might be present with My Lord when he suffered, the priest and I went
before him and behind the men-at-arms, while first went the Warden
of the Castle. And we found that the scaffold had been put up upon
a level with the window at the side of the main gate, which looks
westward towards the City. There was a red cloth upon it, a square,
but the rest naked, and round it a sort of railing of rope stretched
from posts. The whole was guarded by soldiers of the King's Guard
who were a-horse, even the drummers. There was a very great crowd of
people who were silent, but when they saw My Lord shouted and made a
confusion, till the soldiers pressed them back. The Warden asked My
Lord whether he would speak to the people, but he shook his head and
pressed his lips together so firmly that one would have thought he
smiled. Then the Headsman, kneeling upon one knee, as is the custom,
asked My Lord's forgiveness for what he was to do, to whom My Lord
answered in a cheerful voice that he very heartily forgave him and
all others in this matter. And then saying this word "Come," wherein
I did not understand his meaning--but he may have been doing no more
than call me as one calls a servant--he took off his cloak, which was
dark and heavy and which was that which he had commonly carried in the
field, very serviceable and without ornament, and this cloak he handed
to me, so that I have it and will bring it with me upon my journey.
When he had done this he took off also his undercoat, upon which, as
upon his cloak, he had kept no sign of his rank nor any jewel, even of
his Order; and this done he kissed me and also him whom Your Excellency
sent, the Religious; then he knelt down and, as I think, prayed, but
very shortly, after which he laid his head upon the block and asked the
Headsman if it were fairly so. To which the Headsman said yes, and that
at his signal he would strike: which, when it was given, the Headsman
struck, and by the mercy of God was ready at his business: so we threw
a cloth that had been given us quickly over the body of My Lord, and
while the people groaned we lifted him, two men-at-arms, the priest and
I together, to set him in a case of wood which was prepared. Only the
Headsman showed My Lord's head to the people, and said, "So perish all
traitors," while the people still groaned. Then My Lord's head also
was given us and we set it very reverently down, and we covered the
case with the cloth given us, which was the end of the business of that
morning, from which time till now I have not written, but now write as
Your Excellency ordered, and in the first hour in which I find myself
able and in command of myself to do so.
My Lord was a great Captain.
THE SHADOWS
It is always in a time when one's attention is at the sharpest strain,
when innumerable details are separately and clearly grasped by the
mind, and, in a word, when the external circumstance of life is most
real to us that the comic contrast between ourselves and the greatness
outside us can best be appreciated.
We humans make all that present which is never there, and which is
always hurrying past us like the tumble of a stream, an all-important
thing.
A form of dress unusual at one particularly insignificant moment,
a form of words equally unusual, and so forth, seem like immovable
eternities to us; they seem so particularly in those moments when
we are most thoroughly mixed with our time. Then what fun it is to
remember that the whole thing, all the trappings of life, are nothing
but a suit of clothes: old-fashioned almost before we have used them,
and worthless anyhow.
It is a general election that has made me think these things.
In the moment of an election men mix together very closely; the life
of one's time is set before one under a very brilliant and concentrated
light, which shows a thousand things one had forgotten in the habits of
the nation.
One sees so many kinds of men, one finds about one the relics of so
many philosophies, one is astonished to meet, still surviving, so many
illusions--that these contemporary details take up a very exaggerated
place in our mind. Then it is good for one to remember that the whole
of it is but a little smoke.
There are commonplace tags in history which boys can never understand.
One of the most commonplace and the most worn is Burke's exclamation in
the Bristol election. He heard of the death of a man, and said: "What
shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" and the phrase has gone
threadbare, and no school-boy can understand why his elders dwell upon
that phrase.
The reason is that it expresses a thing which is not only obvious, but
which also happens to be of the utmost moment; and it is peculiarly
valuable coming from Burke, who of all men was keenest upon the shams
of his time, who of all men was most immersed in the game of politics,
who of all men, perhaps, in Parliamentary history was capable of
self-deception and of the salaried advocacy which is the basis of
self-deception. Burke is, as it were, a little god or idol of your true
politician. He was a politician of the politicians. Burke is to the
politician what Keats is to the poet, the exemplar, the mirror of the
profession; yet Burke it was who said: "What shadows we are, and what
shadows we pursue!" He was quite right.
A little time ago in Paris an experiment was tried, which later was
repeated in London. It was a curious success in each capital. The
experiment was this: to put upon the stage a play, the time of which
was the sixties of the last century, and to dress the actors up in the
clothes of the sixties. In Paris they went further: they reproduced
the slang, the jests, the very tone and affectations of fashion which
marked the period of Napoleon III. The younger generation, which could
not remember the time, looked on curiously at the experiment. To the
older people it was comic, with an uncanny comedy, and the irony of it
was sometimes more bitter than they liked. So this was man! This was
the immortal being! This was the ambitious fellow who would now write
a deathless poem, now discover the ultimate truths of Hell and Heaven;
now dominate the earth with his machines, now enter the adventure of
Mexico--and the rest! There he was, in peg-top trousers, long whiskers,
and an absurd top-hat with a narrow brim. And there was woman, the
woman, for whom such and such a man had killed himself, such and such
another had volunteered for the Crimea; or the woman of whom a third
had made a distant idol in the Atlas when he was out in Africa. And
there was the woman upon whom the Court depended, or the Ministry;
there was the woman who had inspired the best work of Hugo, or who had
changed the life of Renan. She wore a crinoline. At the back of her
head was a mass of ugly false hair, and how odd these gestures seemed,
and what queer turns of phrases there were in her language! What
waxwork, and how dead the whole thing seemed!
That experiment in either capital was a dreadful one, which will not
easily be tried again. Like all things that grip the mind, the power
of its action lay in its truth, and the truth which vivified that
experiment and gave it its power was the truth that our affairs are
mortal things, and the ephemeral conditions which clothe our lives seem
to us at a moment to be the universe itself, and yet are not even as
important as the dust. They are small, they are ridiculously small--and
also they are evanescent as the snow.
It is an amusement in which I have sometimes indulged, and no doubt
many of those who are reading this have tried it for themselves, to
turn to the files of old newspapers, choosing some period of great
excitement which one can oneself remember, but which is separated
from the present time by a sufficient space of years. It is well
in practising this sport to choose the columns of a journal which
expressed one's own enthusiasm and one's own conviction at the moment.
The smile provoked by such a resurrection of the past must be bitter,
but it will be the more salutary for its bitterness. _There_ is that
great question which (we supposed!) would change the world; _there_ is
all the shouting and the exaggeration and violence; and there, beyond
it, unseen, is the reality which we have come to know. _Their_ future
has become _our_ past, and note how utterly the vision disagrees with
the real stuff, and see how vain the vision was. Look how terrors were
never fulfilled, read how these hopes were still less destined to
fulfilment, and, above all, attached to worthless ends.
In nothing is this lesson better learned or more valuable than in the
matter of loves and hatreds. Look up the heroes. They were your heroes
too. Read mournfully the enormous nonsense which was written of the
villains. "Sir!" said a famous politician and writer of the Victorian
time--"Sir! the world in which Palmerston is allowed to live makes me
doubt the kindness of my Creator!" That is the kind of thing. Smith
is your Hector and Jones is your Thersites! And then the mills of the
years take up that flimsy stuff and begin grinding out reality, and
what a different thing that finished article is from the raw material
of guesswork and imagination with which the mills were fed! You can
look back now and see the real Smith and the real Jones. You can see
that the real Smith was chiefly remarkable for having one leg shorter
than the other, and that the principal talent of the real Jones was the
imitating of a steam engine, or a very neat way of playing cards; and
that both Jones and Smith were of that common stature which men have
in the middle distance of a very ordinary landscape.
For the benefit of mankind, the illusion which it is impossible to feel
with regard to a past actually remembered re-arises when attached to a
past longer still. One can make a hero or villain of Fox or of Pitt.
One can look at the dress of the Eighteenth Century, or the puffs and
slashes of the Sixteenth, not only without a smile, but actually with
pleasure and admiration. We find it glorious to read the English of
Elizabeth, and pleasant to read the plain letters written when George
the Third was King. But, oh heavens! the Idylls of a King! I say, for
the benefit of man, one is allowed an illusion with regard to the
remote past; of the near past which we have known, alas, we know the
truth--and it appals one with its emptiness. There is no doubt at all
that Burke was right for once in his life when he said that we were
shadows and that we pursued shadows.
Nevertheless, there is one important thing, and there is one eternal
subject which survives.
THE CANVASSER
In that part of the Garden of Eden which lies somewhat to the
south-west of the centre thereof the weather, during the recent
election which was held there, was bad. It blew, it rained, it hailed,
it snowed, and all this was on account of the great comet, of which
the people of that region said proudly to strangers, "Have you seen
our comet?" Imagining, with I know not how much justice, that this
celestial phenomenon was local rather than national or imperial.
The Garden of Eden being mainly of a clay soil, large parts of it were
flooded, and a Canvasser (a draper by profession and a Gentleman from
London by birth), unacquainted as he was with the Garden of Eden,
thought it a foul place, and picked his way without pleasure. He went
down a lane the like of which he did not even know to exist in England
(for it was what we call in the Garden of Eden a "green lane," and only
those learned in the place could get along it at all during the floods).
I say he went down this lane, turned back, took a circumbendibus over
some high but abominably sticky ploughed fields, and turned up with
more of English earth than most citizens can boast at the door of the
Important Cottage. He had been given his instructions carefully, and
he was sure of the place. He swung off several pounds of clay from his
boots to the right and to the left, and then it struck him that he did
not know how to accost a cottage door. There was no knocker and there
was no bell. But he had had plenty of proof and instruction dinned into
him as to the importance of that cottage, so at last he made up his
mind to do something bold and unconventional, and he knocked at it with
his knuckles.
Hardly had he done so when he heard within a loud series of syllables
proceeding from two human mouths and consisting mainly of the broad A
in the vowels and of Z by way of the consonants. At last the door was
opened a little way and a rather forbidding-looking old woman, short,
fat, but energetic, looked out at him through the crack. She continued
to look at him curiously, for it is good manners in the Garden of Eden
to allow the guest to speak first.
When the Canvasser grasped this from the great length of silence which
he had to endure, he said with the utmost politeness, taking off his
hat in a graceful manner and speaking with the light accent of the
cultured--
"Is your husband in, madam?"
By way of answer she shut the door upon him and disappeared, and the
Canvasser, not yet angry, marvelled at the ways of the Garden of Eden.
In a few moments she was back again; she opened the door a little
wider, just wide enough to let him come in, and said--
"Ye can see un: but he bain't my husband. He wor my sister's husband
like." As she said this she kept her eyes fixed upon the stranger,
noting every movement of his face and of his body, until she got him
into the large old kitchen. There she put a chair for him, and he sat
down.
He found himself opposite a very, very old man, much older than the old
woman, sitting in a patched easy chair and staring merrily but fixedly
at the fire.
The very, very old man said: "Marnin'."
There was a pause. The Canvasser felt nervous. The old, fat, but
energetic woman, still scowling somewhat and still fixedly regarding
the stranger, said--
"I do be tellin' of un you bain't my husband, you be poor Martha's
husband that was. Ar!"
"Ar!" said the old man, by way of corroboration; and the smile--if it
were a smile--upon his drawn and wrinkled face became more mysterious
than ever.
The Canvasser coughed a little. "I've brought bad weather with me," he
said, by way of opening the delicate conversation.
"Ar!" said the old man. "You ain't brought un nayther! Naw.... Bin ere
a sennight com Vriday...." Then he added more reflectively, and as
though he were already passing into another world, while he stared at
the fire: "You ain't brought un nayther; naw!"
"Well," said the stranger gallantly, though a little put out, "I'm sure
I should have been sorry to have brought it."
"Ar, so you may zay! Main sorry I lay," said the old man, and went off
into a rattle of laughter which ended in a violent fit of coughing.
But even as he coughed he wagged his head from side to side, relishing
the joke immensely, and repeating it several times to himself in the
intervals of his spasms.
"A lot of water lying about," said the Canvasser, hoping to start some
vein at least which would lead somewhere.
"Mubbe zo, mubbe no," said the Ancient, like a true peasant, glancing
sideways for the first time at his visitor and quickly withdrawing his
eyes again. "Thur be mar watter zome plaa-ces nor others.... Zo they
tell," he concluded, for fear of committing himself. Then he added: "I
ain't bin out mesel'."
"He's got rheumatics chronic," said the sister-in-law, standing by and
watching them both with equal disapproval.
"Ar!" said the Ancient. "Arl ower me!"
The Canvasser despaired. He took the plunge. He said as pleasantly as
he could: "I've come to ask you how you're going to vote, Mr. Layton."
"Ow I be whaat?" answered his host with a look of extreme cunning and
affecting a sudden deafness as he put his left hand to his shrivelled
ear and leaned towards the Londoner.
"How you were going to vote, Mr. Layton," said the Canvasser, still
good-humoured, but a little more rosy than before, and leaning forward
and speaking in a louder tone.
"Ow I were voattun?" answered the aged Layton with a touch of
indignation in his cracked tones, "I ain't voättud 'tarl yet!"
"No, no, Mr. Layton," said the Canvasser, relieved at any rate to have
got to the subject. "What I meant was how are you going to vote?"
"Oo! Ar!" quickly caught up the peasant. "If ye'd zed that furst orf,
mebbe I'd a towd ee!" He gave another little cackle of laughter and
looked into the fire.
"It is a very important election, Mr. Layton," said the Canvasser
solemnly. "A great deal hangs on it."
"Doän you be worritin un, young man," said the sister-in-law with a
touch of menace in her tone, her arms akimbo and her attitude sturdy.
"There do be zome," began the Ancient, absolutely off his own,
and, so far as the bewildered Londoner could understand, entirely
irrelevantly--"there do be zome as ave a bit of money lay by, an'
there do be zome as as none. Ar! Them as as none kin do without un."
He laughed again, this time rather unpleasantly, and more shortly than
before.
There was an awkward silence. Then in a louder voice and at a higher
pitch he took up his tale again. "I mind my feythur saäying when I wor
furst r'k-moinding, feythur says to me, 'Ar, you moind rooks and you
get your farp'nce when Farmer Mouwen give it 'ee, and you bring it
straäght whome t' me, zame as I tell ee.'"
This reminiscence concluded, the old man repeated his formula to the
effect that there were some who had money laid by, others who had none,
and that those who had none would have to do without that commodity. Of
this sentiment his sister-in-law, by a slight nod, expressed her full
approval. Her lips were firmer set than ever, and she was positively
glaring at her guest.
The Canvasser began to shift uneasily. "Well, I put it straight, Mr.
Layton," he said--"will you vote for Mr. Richards?"
"Ar! Ye can putt un straäght," answered the Ancient, with a look of
preternatural cunning, "and ah can answer un straäght, an wow! ye'd be
none wiser.... Ar! reckon t' answer any man straäght 's any man there
be erebouts, naabur, nor no naabur! And zo I tell un."
"That's right," said his sister-in-law, approvingly, "and so e
tell 'ee!" She was beginning to look actually threatening, but the
Canvasser had not yet got his answer.
"We really do hope that we can hear you are going to vote for Mr.
Richards," he said pleadingly. "The action of the Government----"
"Ar, zo I do ear say," said the old man, chuckling over some profound
thought. "And Mas'r Willum e do zay thaät too, though e be tother
side." He wagged his head twice with the wise subtlety of age. "Ar now,
which way be I going to voät? Ar? Thaät's what many on us ud like t'
know!"
The Canvasser began to despair. He kept his weary smile upon his face,
rose from his chair, and said: "Well, I must be going now, madam."
"That ye must," said the old lady cheerfully.
"Don't you let un go wi'out gi'ing un some of that wa-ine," said the
host, as he leaned forward in his chair and stirred the down fire with
an old charred stick.
The woman looked at the Canvasser suspiciously and poured him out some
parsnip wine, which he drank with the best grace in the world. As he
lifted the glass he said, with an assumed cheerfulness: "Well! here's
to Mr. Richards!"
"Ar!" said the old man.
The old woman took the glass, wiped it carefully without washing it,
put it back into the cupboard with the bottle, and turned round to
continue her occupation of fixing the stranger with her eye.
"Well, I must be gone," he said for the second time, and in as breezy a
tone as he could command.
"Ar, zo you zay!" was all the reply he obtained, and he left that
citizen of many years still smiling with his bony aged jaws at the down
fire, and muttering again to himself that great truth about material
wealth which had haunted him throughout the brief conversation.
The woman shut the door behind the Canvasser, and he was off across
the fields. In the next cottage he came to he asked them which way old
Layton would vote. The woman at the place answered nothing, but her
son, a very tall and silent young man with a soft nascent beard, who
was stacking wood to the leeward of the house, smiled secretly and
said--
"Ar!"
THE ABSTRACTED MAN
I had occasion the other day to catch a train which was going to the
West of England from Paddington, and I was in a taxi, which was open
because the weather was clear.
Now when we came to within about a quarter of a mile of Paddington we
got into a block, which was exasperating in the extreme, for my time
was short, and immediately in front of me, also in an open taxi--an
astonishing thing, and one I had never seen before--sat a man who
though all alone yet had his back to the driver. Even in the rush of
the moment I could not help being fixed and somewhat stirred by his
face. It was a face of intense weariness, yet in it there was a sort
of patient rest. He had a thin, straggling beard, so thin that it was
composed, as it were, of separate hairs; his eyes were very hollow and
long-drawn, and his eyebrows arched unduly, as though on some occasion
in his life--long past and by this time half forgotten--he had suffered
some immense surprise.