A LORD OF INDIA.
I have to tell her one day of the Empire, the power, the stretch of
it, the count in millions of miles, in millions of souls; the largest
empires, living or dead, mostly but parishes beside hers and mine. In
mere size, Russia, even, beaten by an eighth, the Grand Republic beaten
all but three times over, the late Darius the Great beaten five times
clear--more than forty Germanys, more than fifty Spains! Our own Mother
Island but a dot in a waste beside it, Victoria’s Island but a dot on
the dot, the parasite of a midge. With this, the figures for commerce,
the figures for sails on all the seas that wash the ball, the figures
for wealth--a round nine thousand millions sterling, if we were sold
up to-morrow, and, for all the bad years since ‘seventy-five, a steady
hundred and eighty millions added year by year to the hoard--our
swelling liver almost putrid with the gorge of gold.
Victoria is delighted; wants to measure Pitcairn with her sash--is
stopped; becomes light of heart, effusive; carolleth; offers to take me
to the Cave on the ledge, for a treat--the Cave of the Great Scrape,
I have always called it--pays me a sort of reverence, as one who has
come from the sun of this colossal system--is stopped again. Then,
after purring foolishly over the totals, like a great happy kitten
that has got all the thread in the world for a ball, asks to have them
unravelled in measured inventory. Is told something about Australia,
about Canada, about the Indies. Seems to see it all with ever-dilating
pupils, as a child before a pageant of pantomime. Sees it in procession
of countless tribes, armies, emblemed industries, brother peoples,
subject kings; warriors coated in mail, in crimson, or only in the
black of their own skins; priests bearing every symbol, from the
notched stick to the cross; mechanics, from them that smooth with the
flint hatchet to them that smooth with the Whitworth plane; Nature’s
experiments with the type, from the bushman to the man from Mayfair. At
this, and long before the procession closes, shows signs of worshipping
me again, as a sort of deputy lord of India and the other dependencies
in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. But I turn away.
For modesty forbids, not to speak of the fear of detection. All the
lords of India are not so plump; and I sometimes wonder what the
lordship means. I am a lord of India, it is true, but so is Snip there,
in his sweating-shop, and Swart carrying the sandwich-board, ‘lords
of human kind,’ as it was once put; but let us keep within bounds. I
think of the lordship whenever I meet Swart, whenever I take stock of
all the figures that make the huge stain of shabbiness upon our moving
crowds. A lord of India, too, the man in threadbare who turns out every
morning from Kentish Town or Somers, or other of the circumjacent
wastes, to look for a job in the City, plodding steadily forward for
the hundredth time, with fifteen shillings a week as the goal of hope.
Clean shaven this lord, got up for ‘respectable appearance,’ down to
his last ha’penny, in shining boots, inked for the cracks and patches,
and shining coat; everything shining about him, but the hard and
hopeless face. He is certainly of the Imperial breed--no one can deny
him that--a lord of India, an heir to the ages of struggle and victory
on battle plains dotting our fifth of the globe.
But Swart is the best example, and Victoria is easily stimulated to the
entreaty that I will tell of him all I know. It is worth telling, in
good faith.
‘I first met Swart in Regent Street, a little while before I came out
here. He was sandwiched between two boards of “India in London,” and
there was something so spiritually picturesque in the ruin of him, from
his baggy hat to his mere suggestion of a boot, that it drew me to his
side. I was drawn by curiosity rather than by pity, as a naturalist who
might want to see how the wood-louse lives.’
‘Where is Regent Street? and what is a sandwich-man?’ said Victoria as
I began the tale.
‘We must reserve all that for the footnotes. If I am to keep on
moving, you must let me get under way.’
‘Well, we struck up acquaintance, Swart and I. Did I say that he was
tallish, thin, bent, and grizzled, and foul? I want to get all that
over as soon as may be. Sixty, or thereabouts, I should say, as to
age; a not unkindly face, and not unhandsome, but for its furrows and
puckers of mean cares--a good face spoiled.’
‘I wish I knew what a sandwich-man is,’ she murmured; ‘but it does not
signify. Please go on.’
‘We struck up acquaintance, and I used to walk with him up and down
his beat--he in the gutter, I on the kerb. He had been a soldier, and
had helped to win India back for England at the storming of Lucknow.
He was quite proud of the whole achievement, and of his share in
it. “They was nigh slipping clean away, sir,” he would say of his
Indian fellow-subjects. “You cannot think how nigh they was; but we
just cotched ’em by the tail.” It was pleasant to see Swart proud
of anything; it did so much to improve his air. At such moments, he
seemed almost a man. They were but sun-rifts in a black sky, of
course. Sometimes the policeman would threaten to run him in, for
trespassing on the kerb with the edge of his board. This would tend
to drive him wide of the gutter; then, his foreman would come by,
and growl an oath at him for not walking straight in his furrow, and
threaten him with the sack.’
‘“The sack!”’ said Victoria softly; ‘“run him in!” I am not
interrupting, you know, I am only saving up.’
‘I asked Swart to let me go and see him, but he said “Not yet.” He was
living in a common lodging-house, and he was not allowed to receive
visitors. “If I was allowed,” he said frankly, “I shouldn’t like you
to come. They really ain’t fit company for a gentleman, or, for that
matter, for a common man. We had three took out of their beds last
night for robberies from the person, and one for burglary and murder.
What with the police coming in and out of the room, and flashing their
lights on your faces, there was no getting a wink. There was sixty
sleepin’ in our room, and the row woke most of us up. You may fancy
what it was after that. Besides, I’m gettin’ too old to fight for my
place by the kitchen fire, and I’m cold half the time. Then, if you
ain’t got your fourpence every night, out you go; and I can’t tackle
the Embankment no more. I want a place of my own.”’
‘You might tell me about the Embankment now,’ she said, ‘but, of
course, we’ll make a note of it, if you are going to get cross.’
‘It is an open thoroughfare, the finest in London, bordered, on one
side, by gardens and public palaces, on the other, by the river. The
people who cannot afford to sleep as Swart sleeps are allowed to sleep
there, as a favour, for it is against the law.’
‘But do you mean to say----?’
‘Yes, indeed, I do; that is just what I do mean.’
‘But how _can_ the others go to bed, then?’
‘Well, how can you, for that matter, now you know it? You get used to
such things.’
‘I would never go to bed if I lived there. Never, at least, till----?’
‘A week or two later Swart told me that his place was ready, and that
I might call. He had been saving slowly for his furnishing, for, as
he observed, what can you do on 1_s._ 3_d._ a day? He merely “had his
eye” on a table. I let him keep his eye on it. The experiment was too
interesting to be spoiled by help from me.
‘His place was in White Horse Yard. White Horse Yard, you must know,
Victoria, is a London slum, one of hundreds as clearly marked on the
map, and as well known, as Buckingham Palace or Grosvenor Square.
The description would interest you, as a semi-savage, but to us worn
children of civilisation it is too trite for pleasure or profit. Every
social reformer begins by describing White Horse Yard: it is the
sign of the “’prentice hand.” Swart’s place was reached by a narrow
causeway, reeking with every kind of abomination, and by a staircase,
dark and rotten, and swarming with vermin, as I had afterwards good
reason to know. Here, at the summit, was his back garret, with his bed
of shavings, and his table, made of a packing-case turned upside down.
His neighbours worked at many trades, including that most ancient one
of private plunder. The front garret was the home, as distinct from
the place of business, of “one of them gals.” Swart could never be
induced to be more explicit. On the floor below, they made lawn-tennis
aprons at threepence a dozen, and army coats. They did something with
rabbit-skins in the back drawing-room, for, one day, when Swart opened
his window for air, we were nearly choked with a furry adulteration of
the precious fluid that came in with the fog. A housebreaker who had
been out of work for six months or more, owing to an injury received in
a scuffle with a policeman, occupied the front kitchen, and, by general
consent, he was the quietest man in the house. The back kitchen--but
no, nothing of these premises below the ground level, if you please;
nothing, even in distant allusion, in veiled hint; nothing about the
back yard either, or about the water-butt therein! If you are going to
be foolish, Victoria, I shall just leave off.’
‘I am not foolish.’
‘What are you crying about?’
‘If we let people live so, we should be afraid of God; I think we
should be afraid of every thunderstorm.’
‘The lightning is very tender with us--a chimney-stack now and then;
seldom the steeple of a church.’
‘It is not true. You are just saying things to me. There are missions
in all the cities to look after the poor people. I have read books.’
‘Of course. There were four missions in this very circumscription of
Swart’s, and one Inspector of Public Health.
‘The chief thing the missionaries preached was the sanctity of
submission, or that sanctity of property which had made this dismal
hole what it was. They preached it in a pair of parlours, only less
dismal than Swart’s garret. Their object was to effect a change of
heart as a condition precedent to the change of linen--the cart before
the horse. Of the night of material ugliness around that was, on one
side, the parent of all this spiritual ugliness, they seemed to have
no idea. On Sunday, some of the poor people in the yard went to the
preaching, dubiously, yet still hoping there might be something in it,
their dim intuitions of logic being hardly strong enough to expose
the mockery of its gospel of love. Others went to the drink-shops,
and they were the wiser, for they found a little brightness there.
There was one drink-shop to every two hundred inhabitants; and the
missionaries, who were quite as dull as their hearers, never understood
the reason why.
‘Swart read his paper meanwhile, and joined the crowd in the “pub,”
when he had a penny to spare. He never missed his paper, being quite
a hopeful kind of fool, and inclined to believe that the better luck
was just going to begin. He had revelled in that anticipation, from
Sunday to Sunday, for at least five-and-thirty years. The foreign
intelligence, especially, used to cheer his soul. We were always taking
something to round our Empire off; soon it would be quite trim, and
then! “You may reckon we’ve got Burmah, sir,” he said to me one day,
when news came of the execution of a fresh batch of dacoits. “It’s
as good as ours. There’ll be fine times, I’m thinking, soon. Such a
rumpus, indeed, when it’s all for their good!” He was really angry with
the Burmese. He regarded their war, and all the other little wars, as
only so many accidents of human perversity that tended to defer the
grand opening of a vast humanitarian entertainment known as “Better
times all round.” He had hoped the curtain was going to rise, when
India was quieted down, in the pit. Then came the stupid interruptions
from the Abyssinian and Ashantee sections of the gallery. Then the
Afghan and Zulu fights at the doors. Next, “them there fellers in the
Soudan.” Now, “the Burmah lot.” Swart had been waiting through all this
for a curtain that never stirred.’
‘The curtain is to hide the stage when they are changing the scenery,’
she said, wandering from the subject for a moment, like the big child
she was. ‘It is let down five times in most of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays.
I know.’
‘Yes, you know, Vickey, and so did Swart. Swart was just the man for
that kind of stage-play, being one of those profounder fools who take
everything as it is offered to them, and who will very contentedly
accept two deal boards and a sheet of canvas for a blossoming tree.
They had told him that he, too, was a lord of India, and he believed
it; and he was quite touched, as with the sense of an accession of
personal dignity, when his Sovereign was made Empress as well as
Queen. As he would often observe, all the people in his court were
lords of India, if they only knew it, heirs to the Great Mogul--for he
had a smattering of history--conquerors at Plassey, Mooltan, Moodkee,
Sobraon, and the rest. All Clare Market and Collier’s Rents, and all
the Minories had their share in that great heritage, yet they never
gave it a thought.
‘They could not be got to see it in that way, there was the difficulty.
Swart had endless arguments with them on the calm Sabbath afternoons,
while they waited at the street corners, ankle deep in slush, for the
opening of the houses. He would hurl his figures at their heads; totals
for imports and exports, the growth in shipping, the growth in trade.
There was sometimes an inert obstructive force in their stupidity
against which he could not prevail. The brighter witted mocked him
openly, and always led the argument back from the pageant of Empire to
his own rags. The duller merely spat, but there was dissent in their
expectoration; and sometimes he was obliged to fancy they spat at him.
He would ask me for help in his strait, and I lent him some of the
popular literature of Federation, where the right arguments are all set
down.’
‘We have begun praying for Federation, every Sunday--just after the
Collect. The schoolmaster is writing a Federation hymn.’
‘Try to interrupt me as little as you can, my dear. It checks the flow.
Make notes, and we’ll settle it up afterwards.’ (She took off her
girdle and tied a knot for ‘Federation.’)
‘But I felt less interest in Swart’s dealings with others than in his
dealings with himself. That was the ever-present wonder. I found, on
probing his wound of penury, that he had been waiting for relief, not
for five-and-thirty years merely, but, in a sense, for five hundred.
He was of a most ancient stock, as indeed are most of us, if you will
but think of it; and for all the years it had flourished on this earth,
in so far as the straining vision could trace it through the night
of time, that stock had never escaped from its parent dunghill. And
Swart’s gaze carried back very far. For a man of his class, he had
a quite exceptional knowledge of family history, partly oral, partly
recorded on the fly-leaf of a family Bible, which, for the purpose of
our researches, I lent him the money to get out of pawn.’ (She tied
another knot at ‘pawn.’)
‘The Swarts knew themselves as far back as Anne; nay, with allowances
and conjectural emendations, as far back as the second Charles. Here,
then, was my opportunity, unique, as far as I know, to get at a real
pedigree of a Poor Stupid; how infinitely more interesting than any
pedigree of the baronage, if only by reason of its rarity. I encouraged
him, therefore, by every means in my power, to leave the current
affairs of the Empire for a season, and to talk about the past of his
own race. He was nothing loath, and, after weeks of labour, we had a
family tree drawn out for him that, for hoary age, might not have been
unworthy of a seventh Earl. We had sometimes to make a perilous leap
from bough to bough, as in the best performances of this description,
but we kept that secret to ourselves.’