|I met an old gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with
whom I have a slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he
asked me whether I remembered Walker of _The Daily News_. No, said I,
he was before my time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the
'seventies.
“Before that,” said the old gentleman. “Must have been in the 'sixties.”
“Probably,” I said. “Did you know him in the 'sixties?”
“Oh, I knew him before then,” said the old gentleman, warming to his
subject. “I knew him in the 'forties.”
I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
“Heavens!” said I, “the 'forties!”
“No,” said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a
better view across the ages. “No.... It must have been in
the 'thirties.... Yes, it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school
together in the 'thirties. We called him Sawney Walker.”
I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I
had paid him the one compliment that appealed to him--the compliment of
astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked “well
set” for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his
hundred at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement
was mixed with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent
vanity is the last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last
infirmity that humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that
rages around Dean Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the
angels. I want to feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are
moving upwards in the scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round
and round and biting our tail. I think the case for the ascent of man
is stronger than the Dean admits. A creature that has emerged from the
primordial slime and evolved a moral law has progressed a good way. It
is not unreasonable to think that he has a future. Give him time--and it
may be that the world is still only in its rebellious childhood--and he
will go far.
But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We
are vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of
his acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all
the year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes
at the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots
and his cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of
mine who, in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing
boots to the children at a London school, heard one day a little child
pattering behind her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of
the beneficiaries “keeping up” with her. She turned and recognised the
wearer. “So you've got your new boots on, Mary?” she said. “Yes,” said
little Mary grandly. “Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.” And though, as
we grow older, we cease to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we
find other material to keep the flame of vanity alive. “What for should
I ride in a carriage if the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?” said
the Fifer, putting his head out of the window. He spoke for all of
us. We are all a little like that. I confess that I cannot ride in
a motor-car that whizzes past other motor-cars without an absurd and
irrational vanity. I despise the emotion, but it is there in spite of
me. And I remember that when I was young I could hardly free-wheel down
a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior to the man who was grinding
his way up with heavings and perspiration. I have no shame in making
these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that you, sir (or madam),
will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite audible echo of
yourself.
And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we
are vain of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our
neighbours as we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our
neighbours. We are like the old maltster in “Far from the Madding
Crowd,” when Henery Fray claimed to be “a strange old piece, goodmen.”
“A strange old piece, ye say!” interposed the maltster in a querulous
voice. “Ye be no old man worth naming--no old man at all. Yer teeth
bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis
a poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore--a boast
weak as water.”
It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
when the maltster had to be pacified.
“Weak as water, yes,” said Jan Coggan. “Malter, we feel ye to be a
wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.”
“Nobody,” said Joseph Poorgrass. “Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
malter, and we all respect ye for that gift.”
That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in
being “a very rare old spectacle.” We count the reigns we've lived in
and exalt the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes
at midnight. Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite
early, as in the case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of
Cicero who was only in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as
an old man and wrote his “De Senectute,” exalting the pleasures of old
age. In the eyes of the maltster he would never have been an old man
worth naming, for he was only sixty-four when he was murdered. I
have noticed in my own case of late a growing tendency to flourish my
antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure in recalling the 'seventies to
those who can remember, say, only the 'nineties, that my fine old friend
in the lane had in talking to me about the 'thirties. I met two nice
boys the other day at a country house, and they were full, as boys ought
to be, of the subject of the cricket. And when they found I was worth
talking to on that high theme, they submitted their ideal team to me
for approval, and I launched out about the giants that lived in the
days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds of “W. G.” and
Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G. Steel, and
many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their stature
did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those memories
as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I shall be
proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning nurse.
She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant
vanity we are soothed to sleep.
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