AURELIUS, THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN
We recalled many memories, Ann and I, as we stood in the empty and
silent, but still sunlit yard, on my last visit. At one moment the past
seemed everything, the present a dream; at another, the past seemed
to have gone for ever. Trying, I suppose, to make myself believe that
there had been no break, but only a gradual change, I asked Ann if
things at Abercorran House had not been quieter for some time past.
“Oh no,” said she, “there was always someone new dropping in, and
you know nobody came twice without coming a hundred times. We had
the little Morgans of Clare’s Castle here for more than a year, and
almost crowded us out with friends. Then Mr--whatever was his name--the
Italian--I mean the Gypsy--Mr Aurelius--stayed here three times for
months on end, and that brought quite little children.”
“Of course it did, Ann. Aurelius.... Don’t I remember what he was--can
it be fifteen years ago? He was the first man I ever met who really
proved that man is above the other animals _as an animal_. He was
really better than any pony, or hound, or bird of prey, in their own
way.”
“Now you are _talking_, Mr Froxfield--Arthur, I _should_ say.”
“I suppose I am, but Aurelius makes you talk. I remember him up in
the Library reading that Arabian tale about the great king who had
a hundred thousand kings under him, and what he liked most was to
read in old books about Paradise and its wonders and loveliness. I
remember Aurelius saying: And when he came upon a certain description
of Paradise, its pavilions and lofty chambers and precious-laden trees,
and a thousand beautiful and strange things, he fell into a rapture so
that he determined to make its equal on earth.”
“He is the first rich man I ever heard of that had so much sense,” said
Ann. “Perhaps Aurelius would have done like that if he had been as rich
as sin, instead of owing a wine-and-spirit merchant four and six and
being owed half-a-crown by me. But he does not need it now, that is, so
far as we can tell.”
“What, Ann, is Aurelius dead?”
“That I cannot say. But we shall never see him again.”
“Why frighten me for nothing? Of course he will turn up: he always did.”
“That is impossible.”
“Why?”
“He promised Mr Torrance he would write and wait for an answer every
Midsummer day, if not oftener, wherever he might be. He has now missed
two Midsummers, which he would not do--you know he could not do such a
thing to Mr Torrance--if he was in his right mind. He wasn’t young, and
perhaps he had to pay for keeping his young looks so long.”
“Why? How old could he be?” I said quickly, forgetting how long ago it
was that I met him first.
“I know he is fifty,” said Ann.
I did not answer because it seemed ridiculous and I did not want to be
rude to Ann. I should have said a moment before, had I been asked, that
he was thirty. But Ann was right.
“Where was he last heard of, Ann?”
“I went myself with little Henry Morgan and Jessie to a place called
Oatham, or something like it, where he last wrote from. He had been
an under-gardener there for nearly two years, and we saw the man
and his wife who let him a room and looked after him. They said he
seemed to be well-off, and of course he would. You know he ate little,
smoked and drank nothing, and gave nothing to any known charities.
They remembered him very well because he taught them to play cards
and was very clean and very silent. ‘As clean as a lady,’ she said
to Jessie, who only said, ‘Cleaner.’ You know her way. The man did
not like him, I know. He said Aurelius used to sit as quiet as a book
and never complained of anything. ‘He never ate half he paid for, I
will say that,’ said he. ‘He was too fond of flowers, too, for an
under-gardener, and used to ask why daisies and fluellen and such-like
were called weeds. There was something wrong with him, something on his
conscience perhaps.’ The squire’s agent, a Mr Theobald, said the same
when he came in. He thought there was something wrong. He said such
people were unnecessary. Nothing could be done with them. They were no
better than wild birds compared with pheasants, even when they could
sing, which some of them could do, but not Aurelius. They caused a
great deal of trouble, said my lord the agent of my lord the squire,
yet you couldn’t put them out of the way. He remarked that Aurelius
never wrote any letters and never received any--that looked bad, too.
‘What we want,’ said he--‘is a little less Theobald,’ said Jessie, but
the man didn’t notice her. ‘What we want is efficiency. How are we
to get it with the likes of this Mr What’s-his-name in the way? They
neither produce like the poor nor consume like the rich, and it is by
production and consumption that the world goes round, I say. He was
a bit of a poacher, too. I caught him myself letting a hare out of a
snare--letting it out, so he said. I said nothing to the squire, but
the chap had to go.’ And that’s all we shall hear about Aurelius,” said
Ann. “He left there in the muck of February. They didn’t know where he
was going, and didn’t care, though he provided them with gossip for a
year to come. The woman asked me how old he was. Before I could have
answered, her husband said: ‘About thirty I should say.’ The woman
could not resist saying snappily: ‘Fifty’....”
Aurelius was gone, then. It cannot have surprised anyone. What was
surprising was the way he used to reappear after long absences. While
he was present everyone liked him, but he had something unreal about
him or not like a man of this world. When that squire’s agent called
his under-gardener a superfluous man, he was a brute and he was wrong,
but he saw straight. If we accept his label there must always have been
some superfluous men since the beginning, men whom the extravagant
ingenuity of creation has produced out of sheer delight in variety,
by-products of its immense processes. Sometimes I think it was some of
these superfluous men who invented God and all the gods and godlets.
Some of them have been killed, some enthroned, some sainted, for
it. But in a civilisation like ours the superfluous abound and even
flourish. They are born in palace and cottage and under hedges. Often
they are fortunate in being called mad from early years; sometimes
they live a brief, charmed life without toil, envied almost as much
as the animals by drudges; sometimes they are no more than delicate
instruments on which men play melodies of agony and sweetness.
The superfluous are those who cannot find society with which they
are in some sort of harmony. The magic circle drawn round us all at
birth surrounds these in such a way that it will never overlap, far
less become concentric with, the circles of any other in the whirling
multitudes. The circle is a high wall guarded as if it were a Paradise,
not a Hell, “with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms”: or it is no
more than a shell border round the garden of a child, and there is no
one so feeble but he can slip over it, or shift it, or trample it down,
though powerless to remove it. Some of these weaker ones might seem to
have several circles enclosing them, which are thus upset or trampled
one by one as childhood advances. Everybody discovers that he can cross
their borders. They do not retaliate. These are the superfluous who are
kept alive to perform the most terrible or most loathsome tasks. Rarely
do their tyrants see their eyes gleaming in their dungeons, and draw
back or hurl a stone like a man who has almost trodden upon a fox.
But the superfluous are not always unfortunate; we who knew Aurelius
would never call him unfortunate. There are some--and more than ever in
these days when even the strongest do not condemn outright, and when
deaths less unpleasant to the executioner have been discovered--some
who escape the necessity to toil and spin for others, and do not spend
their ease in manacles. Many of the women among the hunted are not
slaughtered as soon as caught. They are kept in artfully constructed
and choicely decorated cages where their captors try to force them
to sing over and over again the notes which were their allurement
at first; a few survive to wear white locks and trouble with a new
note the serenity of the palaces where their cages are suspended. The
superfluous have been known to learn the ways of their superiors, to
make little camps unmolested in the midst of the foreign land, to enjoy
a life admired of many and sometimes envied, but insincerely.
Some of the captives enslave their masters. Aurelius was one. From my
earliest days Aurelius and rumours of him were much about me. Once he
earned his bread in a great country house by looking after the books
and writing letters. They lodged, fed, and clothed him, and gave him a
small wage--he came from no one knew where, except that it must have
been a gutter or a ditch, as he said, “between the moon and Mercury.”
But he would tell children that he was begotten out of the moonlight
by an owl’s hooting, or that he was born in a tent in the New Forest,
where there were more leaves than money. It was a sort of grievance
against him that he could always buy what he wanted, as a book for
himself or a toy for a child.
He can have been of little use as a letter-writer, as I see now. His
writing looked as unfamiliar as Persian, and must have been laborious.
It was suited to the copying of incantations, horoscopes, receipts
for confectionery. It must often have startled the reader like a line
of trees or flight of birds writing their black legend on the dawn
silver. There was nothing in the meaning of his sentences, I think,
to correspond with the looks of them. A few of his letters survive,
and some notes on accessions to the library, etc.; but it is clear
that they were written in a language foreign to the man, a loose
journalistic English of the moment, neither classic nor colloquial, and
they have no significance.
Some people called him a little man, but in his size as in other things
he seemed rather to be of another species than a diminutive example of
our own. He was smaller than a man, but not unpleasantly small, neither
were his hands too long and delicate, nor were they incapable of a
man’s work. In every way he was finely made and graceful, with clear
large features, curled dark-brown hair and beard almost auburn. His
clothes were part of him, of a lighter brown than his hair and of some
substance which was more like a natural fur than a made cloth. These
clothes, along with his voice, which was very deep, his hair, and his
silent movements, increased his pleasing inhumanity. He sat among many
people and said trivial things, or more often nothing, looking very far
away and very little, turning all light somehow to moonlight, his dark
eyes full of subdued gleaming; and both speech and silence drew upon
him an attention which gave the casual observer an excuse for calling
him vain. Children liked him, though he never troubled to show a liking
for children, and while we sat on his lap or displayed a book for him
he would be talking busily to others, but without offending us. He did
not often tell us tales or play games with us, but he had a swift,
gentle way of putting his hand on our heads and looking at us which
always seemed an honour.
I recall chiefly, in connection with Aurelius, an evening near the end
of winter at the great house. There had been a week of frost, some
days silent and misty, others loud and clear with a north-east wind.
Then came the west wind, a day’s balmy sun, and at last rain. This
day I recall was the next. It was full of goings to and fro of loose
cloud, of yellow threatenings on the hills. The light was thin and
pale, falling tenderly over green fields and their fresh sprinkling
of mole-heaps. But the rain would not descend, and as we got to the
big house for tea the sky cleared, and in the twilight blackbirds
were chinking nervously before sleep and now and then hurrying across
the dim grass between the dark hedges and copses. A robin sang at
the edge of a holly, and a thrush somewhere remote, and the world
had become narrow and homely, the birds sounded secure like happily
tired boys lazily undressing, and evidently they did not expect men.
Three-quarters of a moon hung at the zenith, cold and fresh and
white like an early spring flower. We grew silent, but at tea were
particularly noisy and excited, too excited and near to tears, when
I rushed upstairs. In the library I found Aurelius reading, with his
back to the uncurtained window, by a light that only illuminated his
face and page. Running at first to the window, I pressed my face on
the pane to see the profound of deepening night, and the lake shining
dimly like a window through which the things under the earth might
be seen if you were out. The abyss of solitude below and around was
swallowing the little white moon and might swallow me also; with terror
at this feeling I turned away. “What?” said Aurelius, without even
looking round, but apparently aware of my feeling. Seated in his lap,
he took hardly more notice of me, but I was comforted. His silence was
not a mere absence of words. It was not the peevish silence of one
too cautious or too fearful to speak; nor the silence of one who has
suddenly become isolated and feels it, yet cannot escape. Up out of
the silence rose the voice of Aurelius reading out of the book before
him. Over my shoulder came the rustling of ivy, and the sighing of
trees, and the running of the brook through the coomb; the moon, close
at hand, out in the black garden, pressed her face against the window
and looked in at me. Aurelius was reading of that great king who had
under him a hundred thousand kings, and whose chief delight was in
ancient books telling of the loveliness of Paradise: “And when he met
with this description of the world to come, and of Paradise and its
pavilions, its lofty chambers, its trees and fruits, and of the other
things in Paradise, his heart enticed him to construct its like on
earth....” The world extended to a vastness that came close up to me
and enfolded me as a lake enfolds one swan. Thus at the building of
that Paradise I easily imagined doorways that would have admitted Orion
and the Pleiades together. And at last, at the cry of destruction,
though I was sorry, I was intensely satisfied with both the sadness and
the splendour. I began to dream in the following silence. I dreamed I
was lying at the edge of an immense sea, upon a rock scarcely raised
above the water of the colour of sapphires. I saw go by me a procession
of enormous seals whose backs swelled out of the wavelets like camels,
and as they passed in deep water, a few yards away, each one cast on me
his dark soft eyes, and they were the eyes of Aurelius. There were more
coming behind when I awoke. Aurelius lighted another lamp. I went over
again to the window and looked out. In a flash I saw the outer vast
world of solitude, darkness, and silence, waiting eternally for its
prey, and felt behind me the little world within that darkness like a
lighthouse. I went back to the others. Aurelius for all I knew went to
the kingdoms of the moon.
Many times again he read to us after I had on some pretext brought him
to Abercorran House, a year or two later.
Yet older people said that Aurelius had no perception of religion,
or beauty, or human suffering. Certainly he talked of these things,
as I see now, with a strange and callous-seeming familiarity, as a
poultry-farmer talks of chickens; but our elders did not explain it
when they called it in scorn artistic. I suspect it was in scorn,
though they said it was to humanise him, that they helped to get him
married to a “nice sensible” girl who never came near Abercorran House.
Like many other women, she had been used to petting him as if he were
an animal. He responded with quaint, elaborate speeches and gestures,
kneeling to speak, calling her by different invented names, but perhaps
with a mock-heroic humorous gleam. He married her, and all I know is
that he slipped away from the charming flat where the kindness of
friends had deposited them, and never reappeared in the neighbourhood
except at Abercorran House. He sent her money from time to time which
he earned as trainer to a troupe of dogs in a travelling circus, as a
waiter, as a commercial traveller of some sort. It was said that he
had been to sea. In any case, to hear him sing
“Along the plains of Mexico”
was better than sailing in any ship we had ever been in or imagined.
I am sure that he could not have improved his singing of “Along the
Plains of Mexico” by sailing from Swansea to Ilfracombe or round Cape
Horn, or by getting a heart of oak and a hand of iron. He brought
nothing back with him from his travels. He had no possessions--not a
book, not a watch, not an extra suit of clothes, not a lead pencil.
He could live on nothing, and at times, it was said, had done so. For
his hardiness was great, and habitually he ate almost nothing. Man,
God, and weather could not harm him. Of course he was sometimes put
upon, for he would not quarrel. For having treated him better than he
appeared to have expected, some people could hardly forgive themselves
until they learned to take it as creditable. One tremendous tradesman,
for instance, explained his comparative civility to Aurelius on a
trying occasion by blustering: “You never know where you are with
these Gypsies:” he came, however, to regard himself as a benefactor.
A minister of the gospel who was tricked by Aurelius’ innocence had
to fall back on accusing him of concealing his age and of being a
Welshman. Everyone thought him a foreigner.
It was a remarkable thing that nobody except a few children and Mr
Torrance the schoolmaster--for actually one schoolmaster frequented
Abercorran House--liked to be alone with Aurelius. I never heard this
spoken of, and I believe nobody consciously avoided being alone with
him. Only, it so happened that he was welcomed by a company, but not
one member of it was likely to stay on long if at last he found himself
and Aurelius left behind by the others. Meeting him in the street, no
one ever stopped for more than a few words with him. Some awkwardness
was feared, but not in Aurelius, who was never awkward. Unsympathetic
people called him a foreigner, and there was something in it. In no
imaginable crowd could he have been one of the million “friends,
Romans, countrymen!” Perhaps even at Abercorran House he was not quite
one of us. Yet in a moment he was at home there. I can see him holding
a pigeon--in the correct manner--spreading out one of its wings and
letting it slip back again, while he was talking, as luck would have
it, to Higgs the bird-chap who cared for nothing but pigeons. Higgs
was so taken aback by the way the new-comer talked and held the bird--a
man whom he would instinctively have laughed at--that he could not say
a word, but escaped as soon as possible and blundered about saying: “I
like the little chap.... You can see he’s used to birds--who would have
thought it?--and I wondered what it was young Arthur was bringing in.”
Higgs was so pleased with his own discernment, his cleverness in seeing
good in that unlikely place, that he really exaggerated his liking for
Aurelius. However, let it be set down to Higgs’ credit that he knew a
hawk from a handsaw, and hailed Aurelius almost at first sight.
As I have mentioned, Aurelius had asked me to take him to Abercorran
House, because I had attracted his fancy with something I had said
about the Morgans or the house. It was a lucky introduction. For all
liked him, and he was soon free to stay at the house for a night or
a month, at pleasure. It was one of his virtues to admire Jessie. He
must have felt at once that she was alone among women, since he never
knelt to her or made any of his long, lofty speeches to her as to
other fair women whom he met elsewhere, as at my home. She saw his
merit instantly. To please him she would go on and on singing for him
“The Cuckoo,” “Midsummer Maid,” “Hob-y-deri-dando,” “Crockamy Daisy
Kitty-alone.”
When for a time he was a bookseller’s assistant in London, it was
Jessie discovered him, as she was passing with her mother at night.
She said he was standing outside like one of those young men in
“The Arabian Nights” who open a stall in a market at Bagdad because
they hope to capture someone long-lost or much-desired among their
customers. But he soon wearied of dry goods, and was not seen after
that for over a year, though Mr Torrance brought word that he had
written from Dean Prior in Devonshire, where (he said) a great poet
lived who would have been sorry to die in 1674 if he had known he
was going to miss Aurelius by doing so. Which may be absurd, but Mr
Torrance said it, and he knew both Herrick and Aurelius extremely well.
He did try to explain the likeness, but to an audience that only knew
Herrick as the author of “Bid me to live” and as an immoral clergyman,
and at this distance of time I cannot reconstruct the likeness. But it
may have been that Aurelius wrote verses which Mr Torrance, in the
kindness of his heart, believed to resemble Herrick’s. I know nothing
of that. The nearest to poetry I ever saw of his was a pack of cards
which he spent his life, off and on, in painting. Jessie was one of the
Queens, and rightly so. That this pack was found in the cottage where
he stayed before he finally disappeared, proves, to me at any rate,
that he regarded this life as at an end.