A RETURN TO NATURE
I turn into my next inn with unusual hopes. For it was here some years
ago that I met for the first time a remarkable man. It was nine o’clock
on a late July evening, and the haymakers, only just set free, came
stamping into the bar. The last waggon-load stopped at the door while
the red-whiskered carter stood, one hand on the latch, and drank his
pint before leading his horses into the stall. After the haymakers,
in their pale corduroys and dirty white slops, came a tall, spare,
shock-headed man, not recently shaved, dressed in grey--grey coat, grey
breeches and stockings, and a tall, hard felt hat that was old and
grey. He called for sixpenny ale, and wiping the hay dust from his neck
sat down beside me.
No, he is not here to-day. Perhaps he will never get out of London
again.
I asked him the way to the nearest village, and whether a bed was to
be had there. He answered that it was some way off--paused, looked at
me, drank from his tankard--and added in a lower voice that he would be
glad if I would come and share his place. Such an unusual invitation
enforced assent.
A quarter of a mile down the next by-way he opened a little oaken gate
that slammed after us, and there, in a corner of a small, flat field,
was his sleeping place, under an oak. Would I care to join him in fried
bacon and broad beans and tea at six the next morning?
He lit a wisp of hay and soon had a fire burning, and brought over some
hay and sacks for the second bed. The lights of the farmhouse shone on
the other side of the little field behind lilac bushes. The farmhouse
pump gave out a cry like a guinea fowl for a few minutes. Then the
lights went out. I asked the name of the farm and he told me.
“I come here almost every summer for the haymaking,” he said, and
detecting my surprise that it was not his first year of haymaking, he
continued--
“It is my tenth summer, to be exact.”
He was a man of hardly over thirty, and I noticed that his hands,
though small and fine, were rough and warty and dark. Thoughtlessly I
remarked that he must find the winter hard if he travelled like this
all the year round.
“Yes,” he said, with a sigh, “it is, and that is why I go back in the
winter; at least partly why.”
“Go back----?”
“Yes, to London.”
I was still perplexed. He had the air of a town-bred man of the clerkly
class, but no accent, and I could not think what he did in London that
was compatible with his present life.
“Are you a Londoner, then?”
“Yes, and no. I was born at the village of ---- in Caermarthenshire.
My father was a clerk in a coal merchant’s office of the neighbouring
town. But he thought to better himself, worked hard in the evenings
and came to London, when I was seven, for a better-paid post. We lived
in Wandsworth in a small street newly built. I went to a middle-class
school close by until I was sixteen, and then I went into a silk
merchant’s office. My father died soon after. He had never been strong,
and from the first year’s work in the city, I have heard my mother say,
he was a doomed man. He made no friends. While I was young he gave up
all his spare time to me and was happy, wheeling me, my mother walking
alongside, out into the country on every Sunday that was not soaking
wet, and nearly every Saturday afternoon, too.
“It was on one of these excursions, when they had left me to myself a
little while to talk more gravely than they usually did when we were
out like that, that there was suddenly opened before me--like a yawning
pit, yet not only beneath me but on every side--infinity, endless time,
endless space; it was thrust upon me, I could not grasp it, I only
closed my eyes and shuddered and knew that not even my father could
save me from it, then in a minute it was gone. To a more blessed child
some fair or imposing vision might have risen up out of the deep and
given him a profounder if a sadder eye for life and the world. How
unlike it was to the mystic’s trance, feeling out with infinite soul
to earth and stars and sea and remote time and recognizing his oneness
with them. To me, but later than that, this occasionally recurring
experience was as an intimation of the endless pale road, before and
behind, which the soul has to travel: it was a terror that enrolled me
as one of the helpless, superfluous ones of the earth.
“I was their only child that lived, and my father’s joy in me was very
great, equalled only by his misery at the life which he had to lead
and which he foresaw for me. He used to read to me, waking me up for
the purpose sometimes when he reached home late, or if he did not do
that rousing me an hour before breakfast. His favourite books were
_The Compleat Angler_ and _Lavengro_, the poems of Wordsworth, the
diaries of Thoreau and the _Natural History of Selborne_. I remember
crying--when I was twelve--with despair of human nature’s fickleness to
think that White, even though he was an old man, could have it in his
heart to write that farewell to natural history at the end of his last
letter to Barrington. My father read these books to me several times in
a sad, hoarse voice--as it seemed to me, though when he paused he was
happy enough--which I had often great trouble to endure as I got older
and able and willing to read for myself. So full was I of a sense of
the real wild country which I had never seen--the Black Mountains of
Caermarthen I hardly recalled--that I became fanciful, and despised the
lavish creeper that hung like a costly dress over the fence between our
garden and the next, because the earth it grew in was not red earth but
a black pasty compound, full of cinders and mortar and decayed rags and
kittens. I used to like to go to the blacksmith’s to smell the singeing
hoof and to the tram-stables and smell the horses, and see the men
standing about in loose shirts, hanging braces, bare arms, clay pipes,
with a sort of free look that I could not see elsewhere. The navvies at
work in the road or on the railway line were a tremendous pleasure, and
I noticed that the clerks waiting for their trains in the morning loved
to watch these hulking free and easy men doing something that looked
as if it mattered, not like their own ledger work and so on. I had the
same sort of pleasure looking up the street that rose from east to west
and seeing the sun set between the two precipices of brick wall at the
top; it was as if a gate opened there and through it all the people and
things that saddened me had disappeared and left me to myself; it was
like the pit, too, that opened before me as a little child.
“My father died of consumption. I was then just able to earn my own
living, so I was left in lodgings and my mother returned to Wales. I
worked hard at figures; at least I went early and stayed late and never
stopped to talk to the others; yet I made frequent mistakes, and the
figures swam in a mist of American rivers and English waterfalls and
gipsy camps, so that it was a wonder I could ever see my Thoreau and
Wordsworth and Borrow without these figures. Fancy men adopting as a
cry the ‘right to work’! Apparently they are too broken-spirited to
think of a right to live, and would be content only to work. It is not
wonderful that with such a cry they do very little. Men cannot fight
hard for the ‘right to work’ as I did. My office was at the bottom
of a pit. The four sides of the pit were walls with many windows,
and I could hear voices speaking in the rooms behind and the click
of typewriters, but could not see into them. Only for two or three
days in June could I see the sun out of the pit. But in the hot days
blue-bottles buzzed on my panes and I took care of them until one by
one they lay dead upon the window ledge. There were no spiders and
they seemed to have a good life. Sparrows sometimes flew up and down
the pit, and once for a week I had the company of a black-and-white
pigeon. It sat day after day in a hole in the opposite wall until it
died and fell on to the paved yard below. The clouds sailed over the
top of the pit. Sea-gulls flew over, all golden-winged, in October
afternoons. I liked the fog when all the lights were lit, and though
we did not know one another in the pit we seemed to keep one another
company. But I liked the rain best of all. It used to splash down from
all sides and make a country noise, and I looked up and saw the quaint
cowls sitting like cats on the chimney-pots, and had ridiculous fancies
that took me far away for a second or two.
“The worst time of all was two or three years after my father’s death.
I spent most of my poor earnings on clothes; I took the trouble to talk
and smoke and think as much as possible like the other nine young men
in the railway carriage that took me into the city; I learned their
horrible, cowardly scorn for those who were poor or outlandish, and for
all things that were not like those in their own houses or in those of
the richer people of their acquaintance or envy. We were slaves, and we
gilded our collars.”
“But the journalist and hack writer,” said I, “is worse off. At least
your master only asked for your dregs. The hack writer is asked to give
everything that can be turned into words at short notice, and so the
collar round his neck is never taken off as yours was between six in
the afternoon and nine in the morning.”
“Ah, but it is open to you to do good or bad. We could only do bad.
All day we were doing things which we did not understand, which could
not in any way concern us, which had nothing to do with what we had
been taught at school, had read in books or had heard from our fathers
and mothers. When he was angry the head of the firm used to say we
had better take care or a machine would supersede us in ten years
instead of twenty. We had been driven out of life into a corner in an
underground passage where everything was unnecessary that did not help
us to be quick at figures, or taking down letters from dictation, or
neat in dress and obedient to the slaves who were set over us. When we
were out of the office we could do nothing which unfitted us for it.
The head of the firm used to say that we were each ‘playing a part,
however humble, in the sublime machine of modern civilization, that not
one of us was unnecessary, and that we must no more complain or grow
restive than does the earth because it is one of the least elements in
this majestic universe.’ We continued to be neat when we were away from
the office, we were disobedient to everything and everybody else that
was not armed with the power of taking away our bread--to the old, the
poor, the children, the women, the ideas which we had never dreamed of,
and that came among us as a white blackbird comes in the winter to a
barbarous parish where keeper and gardener and farmer go out with their
guns and stalk it from hedge to hedge until, starved and conspicuous
and rather apart from its companions, it falls to their beastly shot
and is sold to one of the gentry who puts it into a glass case.
“Sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday I broke away in a vague unrest,
and walked alone to the pretty places where my father and mother had
taken me as a little boy. Most of them I had not seen for five or six
years. My visits were often formal. I walked out and was glad to be
back to the lights of the street, the strong tea, the newspaper and the
novel. But one day I went farther than usual to a wood where we used
to go without interference and, after finding all the blackbirds’ and
thrushes’ and robins’ nests within reach, boil a kettle and have tea.
I had never in that wood seen any man or woman except my father and
mother; never heard a voice except theirs--my father perhaps reading
Wordsworth aloud--and the singing birds’ and the moorhens’ in the pond
at the edge; it used to shut out everything but what I had learned to
love most, sunshine and wind and flowers and their love. When I saw it
again I cried; I really could not help it. For a road had been made
alongside of it, and the builder’s workmen going to and fro had made
a dozen gaps in the hedge and trodden the wood backward and forward
and broken down the branches and made it noisome. Worse than all, the
field, the golden field where I used to lie among the buttercups and be
alone with the blue sky--where I first felt the largeness and dearness
and nearness of the blue sky as a child of eight and put up my hand in
my delight to draw it through the soft blue substance that seemed so
near--the field was enclosed, a chapel built; it was a cemetery for all
the unknown herd, strange to one another, strange to every one else,
that filled the new houses spreading over the land.
“At first I was for running away at once. But the sight made me
faint-hearted and my legs dragged, and it was all I could do to get
home--I mean, to my lodgings.
“However, I was quite different after that. I was ashamed of my ways,
and now spent all my spare time and money in going out into the country
as far as possible, and reading the old books and the new ones that I
could hear of in the same spirit. I lived for these things. It was now
that I knew my slavery. Everything reminded me of it. The return half
of my railway ticket to the country said plainly, ‘You have got to be
back at ---- not later than 10.39 p.m.’ Then I used to go a different
way back or even walk the whole way to avoid having this thing in my
pocket that proclaimed me a slave.
“It was now that I first accepted the invitation of a relation who
lived on the east coast very near the sea. The sea had a sandy shore
bounded by a perpendicular sandy cliff, to the edge of which came rough
moorland. The sea washed the foot of the cliff at high tide and swept
the yellow sand clean twice a day, wiping away all footprints and
leaving a fresh arrangement of blue pebbles glistering in the bitter
wind. It was impossible to be more alone than on this sand, and I was
contented again. The sea brought back the feelings I had when I lay in
the buttercup field--the cemetery--and looked into the sky. Walking
over the moor the undulations of the land hid and revealed the sea in
an always unexpected way, and often as I turned suddenly I seemed to
see the blue sky extended so as to reach nearly to my feet and half-way
up it went small brown or white clouds like birds--like ships--in fact
they were ships sailing on a sea that mingled with the sky. It seemed
a beautiful life, where clouds could not help being finely spun or
carved, or pebbles help being delicious to eye and touch. But out of
the extremity of my happiness came my worst grief. I fell in love. I
fell in love with one of my cousins, a girl of seventeen. She never
professed to return my love, but she was a most true friend, and for
a time I was intoxicated with the delight; I now envy even the brief
moment of pain and misery that I had in those days.
“She was clever and understanding so that I was always at my best
with her, and yet, too, she was as sweet as a child and strange as an
animal. The few moments of pain were when I saw her with the other
girls. When they were together, running on the sands or talking or
dancing they seemed all to be one, like the wind; and sometimes I
thought that like the wind they had no heart amongst them--except
mine that raced with the runners and sighed among the laughers. It
was lovely to see her with animals! with cows or horses, her implicit
motherhood going out to them in an animal kindness, a bluff tenderness
without thought. At times I looked carefully and solemnly into her
eyes until I was lost in a curious pleasure like that of walking in a
shadowy, still, cold place, a cathedral or wintry grove--she had the
largest of dark grey eyes; and she did not turn away or smile, but
looked fearlessly forward, careless and unashamed like a deep pool in
a wood unused to wayfarers. Then she seemed so much a child, and I
longed for the days (which I had never really had) when I could have
been as careless and bold and free as she was. No, I could never teach
those eyes and lips the ways of love: that was for some boy to do. And
I thought I will be content to love her and to have her friendliness.
I was old for my years, and my life without the influence of women
in office and lodgings, I thought, had made me unfit for her delicate
ways. I turned away and the sunny ships in the sea were mournful
because of my thoughts. But I could not wait. I told her my love. She
was not angry or indifferent. She did not reject it. She was afraid.
They sent her away to college. She overworked and overplayed, and they
have told me she is now a schoolmistress. I see her sad and firm with
folded hands. When I knew her she was tall and straight, with long
brown hair in two heavy plaits, a shining, rounded brow, dark-lashed,
grey eyes, and a smile of inexpressible sweetness in which I once or
twice surprised her, pleased with the happiness and beauty of her
thoughts and of Nature.
“When I had lost her, or thought I had--
Not comforted to live
But that there is this jewel in the world
Which I may see again----
I resolved that I would not be a slave any more. For a few weeks I used
to fancy it was only by a chance I had lost her, and every now and then
as I mused over it I got heated and my thoughts raced forward as if in
the hope of overtaking and averting that very evil chance which had
already befallen, and had in fact caused the train of thought.
“I saved every penny that I could from my salary. In six months I had
saved twenty pounds. Out of this I bought a new black suit, a pair of
boots and a hat, and gave them to my landlady and asked her to take
care of them until I returned, which might be at the end of October. It
was then April. I gave notice to my employers and left them. The next
day very early I left London, and walked all day and all night until
I reached the sea. There I bathed and ate a hearty meal, and walking
along the cliffs till I came to a small farmhouse I engaged a bedroom,
and there I slept and thought and slept undisturbed for twenty-four
hours. I was free. I was free to dream myself no longer one of the
mob-led mob. With care my money would last until mid-summer, even if I
did no work.
“It was a warm, wet May, and by the end of the month there was a
plentiful crop of weeds, and I had no difficulty in getting work at
hoeing. Strawberry picking and cherry picking followed. I was very
slow and earned little, but it was now warm enough to sleep out, and
I earned my food. By the end of July, as I liked the work, I was as
useful with my hayrake as any of the women and better than most of the
odd hands. I wore my fingers raw at tying up barley and oats and, later
on, at feeding the threshing machine. But before the end of October the
weather drove me back to London, with ten shillings in my pocket.
“I put on my new clothes and got as good a berth as my first one, and
in the hope of another spring and summer out of doors I passed the
winter cheerfully. To save more money I went to bed as soon as I got
back to my lodgings, and read myself to sleep.
“In May a spell of fine weather drove me to give notice again, and I
walked as far as Maidstone the first day. My second summer was like my
first. I was already known at half-a-dozen farms. When they could not
give me work at once they gave me leave to fish in the three or four
ponds to be found on all the farms in the Weald of Kent, and I had
many a large, if not always savoury, meal of tench and eels. At the end
of the summer I had three pounds in my pocket, and little less by the
end of October.
“The winter I passed as before. For five years I lived in this way.
Then, for the sake of going abroad on my savings, I worked for a whole
year at a desk, and spent four months along the Loire and down to
Bordeaux; from there I worked my passage to Newport. Since then I have
gone back to my old plan.”
Here he paused and mused. I asked him if he still found it easy to get
work in London.
“No, that’s it,” he replied; “my handwriting is worse and it is slow.
The first weeks in London seem to undo all the good of my summer
outing, especially as my salary is less than it used to be. They begin
to ask me if I am a married man when I apply for work. The November
rains remind me that I have rheumatism. It is my great fear that I may
need a doctor, and so spend my savings, and be unable to leave London
until field work is plentiful in June. But I have my freedom; I could,
if necessary, take an under-cowman’s place and live entirely on the
land. They begin to look at my hands when I apply for clerical work,
and I can’t wear gloves.”
“And ten years hence?”
“That is ten years too far ahead for me to look, though I am less
cheerful than I used to be. I realize that I belong to the suburbs
still. I belong to no class or race, and have no traditions. We of the
suburbs are a muddy, confused, hesitating mass, of small courage though
much endurance. As for myself, I am world-conscious, and hence suffer
unutterable loneliness. I know what bitterness it is to be lacking in
those strong tastes and impulses which, blinding men to what does not
concern them, enables them to live with a high heart. For example, I
have a sensitive palate and am glad of my food, yet whenever I taste
lamb--which I do when I can--my pleasure is spoilt by the sight of the
butcher carrying a lamb under his arm. There it is. I am sensitive on
all sides. Your true man would either forget the sight or he would be
moved to a crusade. I can do neither.
“I am weary of seeing things, the outsides of things, for I see nothing
else. It makes me wretched to think what swallows are to many children
and poets and other men, while to me they are nothing but inimitable,
compact dark weights tumbling I do not know how through the translucent
air--nothing more, and yet I know they are something more. I apprehend
their weight, buoyancy and velocity as they really are, but I have no
vision. Then it is that I remember those words of Sir Thomas Browne’s--
“‘I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet
makes no part in us; and that it is the Spirit of God, the fire and
scintillation of that noble and mighty essence, which is the life and
radical heat of spirits.... This is that gentle heat that brooded on
the waters and in six days hatched the world; this is that irradiation
that dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow,
despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity. Whosoever
feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though
I feel his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to
me there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwell in
the body of the sun.’
“I dare not say I live. And yet the cows, the well-fed, quiet cows, in
this fine soft weather stare enviously at me through the gate, though
they know nothing of death, and I know it must come, and that even
though often desired, when it comes it will be unwelcome----Yet they
stare enviously at me, I am sure.
“I have no courage. I can at least endure. I can use my freedom to
become a slave again, and at least I know that I have lost nothing by
my way of living. Yes, I can endure, and if after my death I am asked
questions difficult to answer, I can ask one that is unanswerable
which I have many times asked myself--often in London, but not here.
Here I love my food and my work, my rest. My dreams are good. I am not
unkindly spoken to; I make no enemies.
“But yet I cannot look forward--there is nothing ahead--just as I
cannot look back. My people have not built; they were not settled on
the earth; they did nothing; they were oil or grit in a great machine;
they took their food and shelter modestly and not ungratefully from
powers above that were neither kind nor cruel. I hope I do no less; I
wish I could do more.
“Now again returns that old feeling of my childhood--I felt it when I
had left my cousin--I have felt it suddenly not only in London, but
on the top of the Downs and by the sea; the immense loneliness of
the world, as if the next moment I might be outside of all visible
things. You know how it is, on a still summer evening, so warm that
the ploughman and his wife have not sent their children to bed, and
they are playing, and their loud voices startle the thought of the
woods; my feeling is like that, space and quiet and my own littleness
stupendously exaggerated. I have wished I could lay down my thoughts
and desires and noises and stirrings and cease to trouble that great
peace. It was, perhaps, of this loneliness that the Psalmist spoke: ‘My
days are consumed like smoke.... I watch, and am as a sparrow alone
on the housetop.’ The world is wrong, but the night is fine; the dew
light and the moist air is full of the honeysuckle scent. I will smoke
another pipe of your tobacco and leave you for a while. I like to be
alone before I sleep.”
The next I saw of him was when he was frying bacon and boiling beans
for our meal. “Forget my night thoughts,” he said, “and be thankful
for the white dry road and the blue sky. We are not so young but that
we must be glad it is summer and fine. As for me, the dry weather is
so sweet that I like the smell of elder flower and the haycart horses’
dung and the dust that get into the throat of an evening. Good-bye.”
He went away to wash at the pump, as the cattle spread out from the
milking-stalls into the field and filled it with their sweet breath and
the sound of their biting the thick grass.
I saw him again a few years later.
London was hot and dry, and would have been parched, cracked and
shrivelled had it been alive instead of dead. The masonry was so dry
that the eye wearied of it before the feet wearied of the pavement,
and both desired the rain that makes the city at one with Nature.
The plane-trees were like so many captives along the streets,
shackled to the flagstones, pelted with dust, humiliated, all their
rusticity ravished though not forgotten. The very sky, lofty, blue,
white-clouded, was parched, the blue and the white being soiled by a
hot, yellowish-grey scum that harmonizes with gritty pavements and
stark towers and spires. The fairest thing to be seen--away from the
river--was the intense young green of the grass-blades trying to grow
up through the gratings which surround the trees of the streets. The
grass was a prophet muttering wild, ambiguous things, and since his
voice was very small and came from underground, it was hard to hear
him, even without understanding. Thousands tread down the grass, so
that except for a few hours at night it can never emerge from the
grating.
Some vast machinery plunged and thundered behind the walls, but though
they trembled and grew hot, it burst not through. Even so the multitude
in the streets, of men and horses and machines and carriages of all
kinds, roared and moved swiftly and continuously, encaged within walls
that are invisible; and they also never burst through. Both are free
to do what they are told. All of the crowd seem a little more securely
imprisoned than him who watches, because he is aware of his bars; but
they move on, or seem to do, on and on, round and round, as thoughtless
as the belt of an engine.
There was not one face I knew; not one smiled; not one relaxed or
contracted with a thought, an emotion, a fancy; but all were clear,
hard, and fixed in a vice, so that though they were infinite in their
variety--no two eyebrows set the same way, no two mouths in the same
relation to the eyes--the variety seemed the product of a senseless
ingenuity and immense leisure, as of a sublime philatelist. Hardly
one spoke; only the women moved from left to right instead of straight
on, and their voices were inaudible when their lips moved. The roar in
which all played a part developed into a kind of silence which not any
one of these millions could break; the sea does not absorb the little
rivers more completely than this silence the voices of men and women,
than this solitude their personalities. Now and then a face changed, an
eyebrow was cocked, or a mouth fell; but it meant less to me than the
flutter as of a bird when drop by drop the rain drips from the beeches
and gives a plash and a trembling to one leaf and then another in the
undergrowth. There is a more than human force in the movement of the
multitude, more than the sum of all the forces in the arched necks, the
grinding chest muscles, and the firm feet of the horses, the grace of
the bright women, the persistency of the tall men and thick men. They
cannot stop. They look stupid or callous or blank or even cruel. They
are going about another’s business; they conceal their own, hiding it
so that they forget (as a drunkard forgets where he has hidden his
gold) where they have hidden it, hiding their souls under something
stiffer and darker than the clothing of their bodies. It is hard to
understand why they do not sometimes stop one another, to demand where
the soul and the soul’s business is hid, to snatch away the masks.
It was intolerable that they were not known to me, that I was not
known to them, that we should go on like waves of the sea, obeying
whatever moon it is that sends us thundering on the unscalable shores
of night and day. Such force, such determination as moved us along the
burning streets might scale Olympus. Where was he who could lead the
storming-party?
Between a pack of cabs and a pack of ’buses there was a quiet space of
fifty yards in length; for a little while it seemed that the waves were
refusing their task. There was not one black coat, not one horse, not
one brightly loaded ’bus: no haste. It was a procession.
In front marched a tall son of man, with white black-bearded face, long
black hair, more like plumage than hair in its abundance and form,
and he wore no hat. He walked straight as a soldier, but with long,
slow steps, and his head hung so that his bare breast supported it,
for he had no coat and his shirt was half open. He had knee-breeches,
bare dark legs, and shoes on his feet. His hands were behind his back,
as if he were handcuffed. Two men walked beside him in other men’s
black clothes and black hats worn grey--two unnoticeable human beings,
snub-nosed, with small, rough beards, dull eyes, shuffling gait. Two
others followed them close, each carrying one of the poles of a small
white banner inscribed with the words: “The Unemployed.” These also
were unnoticeable, thin, grey, bent, but young, their clothes, their
faces, their hair, their hats almost the same dry colour as the road.
It was impossible to say what their features were, because their
heads hung down and their hats were drawn well on to their heads, and
their eyes were unseen. They could not keep step, nor walk side by
side, and their banner was always shaky and always awry. Next, in no
order, came three others of the same kind, shambling like the rest, of
middle height, moderately ill-dressed, moderately thin, their hands
in their pockets. In one of these I recognized the man who was born
in Caermarthenshire. A cart came close behind, drawn by a fat grey
donkey who needed no driving, for the one who rode in the cart had his
back to the shafts, and, leaning forward on a tub into which money was
expected to be thrown, he appeared to be talking to those who trailed
at the back, for he waved an arm and wagged his yellow beard. He was
fat, and dressed in a silk hat, frock-coat and striped trousers, almost
too ancient to be ridiculous had they not kept company with a jaunty
pair of yellow boots. He was midway between a seaside minstrel and a
minister, had not one gesture destroyed the resemblance by showing
that he wore no socks. Round about his coat also were the words: “The
Unemployed,” repeated or crudely varied. Those whom he addressed were
the fifteen or twenty who completed the procession but seemed not to
listen. They were all bent, young or middle-aged men, fair-haired, with
unintentional beards, road-coloured skins and slightly darker clothes.
Many wore overcoats, the collars turned up, and some had nothing under
them except a shirt, and one not that. All with hands in pockets, one
carrying a pipe, all silent and ashamed, struggled onward with bent
knees. No two walked together; there was no approach to a row or a
column in their arrangement, nor was there any pleasing irregularity
as of plants grown from chance-scattered seed; by no means could they
have been made to express more feebleness, more unbrotherliness, more
lack of principle, purpose or control. Each had the look of the meanest
thief between his captors. Two blue, benevolent, impersonal policemen,
large men, occasionally lifted their arms as if to help forward the
contemptible procession; sometimes, with a quick motion of the hand,
they caused the straggling rear to double their pace for a few yards
by running with knees yet more bent and coat-tails flapping and hands
still deep in pockets--only for a few yards, for their walking pace was
their best, all having the same strength, the same middle height, the
same stride, though no two could be seen keeping step.
The traffic thickened, and amidst the horses that nodded and trampled
and the motor-cars that fumed and fretted the procession was closed up
into a grey block behind the donkey-cart. On one side of the donkey
was the black-bearded man, his right arm now resting on the animal’s
neck; on the other side the policemen; in front the standard-bearers
hung down their heads and held up their poles. Often the only remnant
visible was the raven crest of the leader.
The multitude on the pavement continued to press straight onward, or
to flit in and out of coloured shops. None looked at the standard,
the dark man and his cloudy followers, except a few of the smallest
newspaper boys who had a few spare minutes and rushed over to march
with them in the hope of music or a speech or a conflict. The straight
flower-girl flashed her eyes as she stood on the kerb, her left arm
curving with divine grace round the shawl-hidden child at her bosom,
her left hand thrust out full of roses. The tender, well-dressed women
leaning on the arms of their men smiled faintly, a little pitiful, but
gladly conscious of their own security and pleasantness. Men with the
historic sense glanced and noted the fact that there was a procession.
One man, standing on the kerb, took a sovereign from his pocket,
looked at it and then at the unemployed, made a little gesture of
utter bewilderment, and dropping the coin down into the drain below,
continued to watch. Comfortable clerks and others of the servile
realized that here were the unemployed about whom the newspapers
had said this and that--(“a pressing question”--“a very complicated
question not to be decided in a hurry”--“it is receiving the attention
of some of the best intellects of the time”--“our special reporter is
making a full investigation”--“who are the genuine and who are the
impostors?”--“connected with Socialist intrigues”)--and they repeated
the word “Socialism” and smiled at the bare legs of the son of man
and the yellow boots of the orator. Next day they would smile again
with pride that they had seen the procession which ended in feeble,
violent speeches against the Army and the Rich, in four arrests and an
imprisonment. For they spoke in voices gentle with hunger. They were
angry and uttered curses. One waved an arm against a palace, an arm
that could scarcely hold out a revolver even were all the kings sitting
in a row to tempt him. In the crowd and disturbance the leader fell and
fainted. They propped him in their arms and cleared a space about him.
“Death of Nelson,” suggested an onlooker, laughing, as he observed the
attitude and the knee-breeches. “If he had only a crown of thorns ...”
said another, pleased by the group. “Wants a bit of skilly and real
hard work,” said a third.