to judge of it. Go back to your home and be at peace with the world.”
“Mine’s all walk-on,” said Simon, and turning away he looked towards
his home. Distant or near there was nothing he could see but trees, not
a glint of sea, and little of sky, and nothing of a hill or the roof
of a friendly house—just a trap of trees as close as a large hand held
before a large face, beeches and beeches, pines and pines. And buried
in the middle of it was a tiny hut, sour and broken; in the time of
storms the downpour would try to dash it into the ground, and the wind
would try to tear it out. Well, he had had his enough of it, so he went
to another man, a scholar for learning, and told him his intentions and
his wishes.
“To heaven!” said the scholar. “Well, it’s a fair day for that
good-looking journey.”
“It is indeed a fine day,” said Simon. As clear as crystal it was, yet
soft and mellow as snuff.
“Then content you, man Simon, and stay in it.”
“Ah, sir,” he says, “I’ve a mind and a will that makes me serve them.”
“Cats will mouse and larks will sing,” the scholar said, “but you are
neither the one nor the other. What you seek is hidden, perhaps hidden
for ever; God remove discontent and greed from the world: why should
you look on the other side of a wall—what is a wall for?”
The old man was silent.
“How long has this notion possessed you?”
The old man quavered “Since ... since ...” but he could say no more. A
green bird flew laughing above them.
“What bird is that—what is it making that noise for?”
“It is a woodpecker, sir; he knows he can sing a song for Sixpence.”
The scholar stood looking up into the sky. His boots were old—well,
that is the doom of all boots, just as it is of man. His clothes were
out of fashion, so was his knowledge; stripped of his gentle dignity he
was but dust and ashes.
“To travel from the world?” he was saying. “That is not wise.”
“Ah, sir, wisdom was ever deluding me, for I’m not more than half
done—like a poor potato. First, of course, there’s the things you don’t
know; then there’s the things you do know but can’t understand; then
there’s the things you do understand but which don’t matter. Saving
your presence, sir, there’s a heap of understanding to be done before
you’re anything but a fool.”
“He is not a fool who is happy; mortal pleasures decline as the bubble
of knowledge grows; that’s the long of it, and it’s the short of it
too.”
Simon was silent, adding up the buttons on the scholar’s tidy coat. He
counted five of them, they shone like gold and looked—oh, very well
they looked.
“I was happy once,” then he said. “Ah, and I remember I was happy
twice, yes, and three times I was happy in this world. I was not happy
since....”
“Yes, since what?” the scholar asked him: but the old man was dumb.
“Tell me, Simon, what made you happy.”
“I was happy, sir, when I first dwelled in the wood and made with my
own hands a house of boards. Why—you’d not believe—but it had a chimney
then, and was no ways draughty then, and was not creaky then, nor
damp then; a good fine house with a door and a half door, birds about
it, magpies and tits and fine boy blackbirds! A lake with a score of
mallards on it! And for conies and cushats you could take your oath of
a meal any day in the week, and twice a day, any day. But ’tis falling
with age and weather now, I see it go; the rain wears it, the moss rots
it, the wind shatters it. The lake’s as dry as a hen’s foot, and the
forest changes. What was bushes is timber now, and what was timber is
ashes; the forest has spread around me and the birds have left me and
gone to the border. As for conies, there’s no contriving with those
foxes and weasels so cunning at them; not the trace of a tail, sir,
nothing but snakes and snails now. I was happy when I built that house;
that’s what I was; I was then.”
“Ah, so, indeed. And the other times—the second time?”
“Why, that was the time I washed my feet in the lake and I saw....”
“What, man Simon, what did you see?”
Simon passed his hand across his brow. “I see ... ah, well, I saw it. I
saw something ... but I forget.”
“Ah, you have forgotten your happiness,” said the scholar in a soft
voice: “Yes, yes.” He went on speaking to himself: “Death is a naked
Ethiope with flaming hair. I don’t want to live for ever, but I want to
live.”
He took off his coat and gave it to Simon, who thanked him and put it
on. It seemed a very heavy coat.
“Maybe,” the old man mumbled, “I’ll get a lift on the way.”
“May it be so. And good-bye to you,” said the scholar, “’Tis as fine a
day as ever came out of Eden.”
They parted so, and old Simon had not been gone an hour when the
scholar gave a great shout and followed after him frantic, but he could
not come up with him, for Simon had gone up in a lift to heaven—a lift
with cushions in it, and a bright young girl guiding the lift, dressed
like a lad, but with a sad stern voice.
Several people got into the lift, the most of them old ladies, but no
children, so Simon got in too and sat on a cushion of yellow velvet.
And he was near sleeping when the lift stopped of a sudden and a lady
who was taken sick got out. “Drugs and lounge!” the girl called out,
“Second to the right and keep straight on. Going up?”
But though there was a crowd of young people waiting nobody else got
in. They slid on again, higher and much higher. Simon dropped into
sleep until the girl stopped at the fourth floor: “Refreshments,” she
said, “and Ladies’ Cloak Room!” All the passengers got out except
Simon: he sat still until they came to the floor of heaven. There he
got out, and the girl waved her hand to him and said “Good-bye.” A few
people got in the lift. “Going down?” she cried. Then she slammed the
door and it sank into a hole and Simon never laid an eye on it or her
from that day for ever.
Now it was very pleasant where he found himself, very pleasant indeed
and in no ways different from the fine parts of the earth. He went
onwards and the first place he did come to was a farmhouse with a
kitchen door. He knocked and it was opened. It was a large kitchen; it
had a cracked stone floor and white rafters above it with hooks on them
and shearing irons and a saddle. And there was a smoking hearth and an
open oven with bright charred wood burning in it, a dairy shelf beyond
with pans of cream, a bed of bracken for a dog in the corner by the
pump, and a pet sheep wandering about. It had the number 100 painted
on its fleece and a loud bell was tinkling round its neck. There was a
fine young girl stood smiling at him; the plait of her hair was thick
as a rope of onions and as shining with the glint in it. Simon said to
her: “I’ve been a-walking, and I seem to have got a bit dampified like,
just a touch o’ damp in the knees of my breeches, that’s all.”
The girl pointed to the fire and he went and dried himself. Then he
asked the girl if she would give him a true direction, and so she gave
him a true direction and on he went. And he had not gone far when he
saw a place just like the old forest he had come from, but all was
delightful and sunny, and there was the house he had once built, as
beautiful and new, with the shining varnish on the door, a pool beyond,
faggots and logs in the yard, and inside the white shelves were loaded
with good food, the fire burning with a sweet smell, and a bed of rest
in the ingle. Soon he was slaking his hunger; then he hung up his coat
on a peg of iron, and creeping into the bed he went into the long sleep
in his old happy way of sleeping.
But all this time the scholar was following after him, searching
under the sun, and from here to there, calling out high and low, and
questioning the travelling people: had they seen a simple man, an old
man who had been but three times happy?—but not a one had seen him.
He was cut to the heart with anxiety, with remorse, and with sorrow,
for in a secret pocket of the coat he had given to Simon he had
left—unbeknown, but he remembered it now—a wallet of sowskin, full of
his own black sins, and nothing to distinguish them in any way from
any other man’s. It was a dark load upon his soul that the poor man
might be punished with an everlasting punishment for having such a
tangle of wickedness on him and he unable to explain it. An old man
like that, who had been happy but the three times! He enquired upon
his right hand, and upon his left hand he enquired, but not a walking
creature had seen him and the scholar was mad vexed with shame. Well,
he went on, and on he went, but he did not get a lift on the way. He
went howling and whistling like a man who would frighten all the wild
creatures down into the earth, and at last he came by a back way to
the borders of heaven. There he was, all of a day behind the man he
was pursuing, in a great wilderness of trees. It began to rain, a soft
meandering fall that you would hardly notice for rain, but the birds
gave over their whistling and a strong silence grew everywhere, hushing
things. His footfall as he stumbled through briars and the wild gardens
of the wood seemed to thump the whole earth, and he could hear all the
small noises like the tick of a beetle and the gasping of worms. In
a grove of raspberry canes he stood like a stock with the wonder of
that stillness. Clouds did not move, he could but feel the rain that
he could not see. Each leaf hung stiff as if it was frozen, though it
was summer. Not a living thing was to be seen, and the things that were
not living were not more dead than those that lived but were so secret
still. He picked a few berries from the canes, and from every bush as
he pulled and shook it a butterfly or a moth dropped or fluttered away,
quiet and most ghostly. “An old bit of a man”—he kept repeating in his
mind—“with three bits of joy, an old bit of a man.”
Suddenly a turtle dove with clatter enough for a goose came to a tree
beside him and spoke to him! A young dove, and it crooed on the tree
branch, croo, croo, croo, and after each cadence it heaved the air into
its lungs again with a tiny sob. Well, it would be no good telling what
the bird said to the scholar, for none would believe it, they could
not; but speak it did. After that the scholar tramped on, and on again,
until he heard voices close ahead from a group of frisky boys who were
chasing a small bird that could hardly fly. As the scholar came up
with them one of the boys dashed out with his cap and fell upon the
fledgling and thrust it in his pocket.
Now, by God, that scholar was angry, for a thing he liked was the notes
of birds tossed from bush to bush like aery bubbles, and he wrangled
with the boy until the little lad took the crumpled bird out of his
pocket and flung it saucily in the air as you would fling a stone. Down
dropped the bird into a gulley as if it was shot, and the boys fled
off. The scholar peered into the gulley, but he could not see the young
finch, not a feather of it. Then he jumped into the gulley and stood
quiet, listening to hear it cheep, for sure a wing would be broken,
or a foot. But nothing could he see, nothing, though he could hear
hundreds of grasshoppers leaping among the dead leaves with a noise
like pattering rain. So he turned away, but as he shifted his foot he
saw beneath it the shattered bird: he had jumped upon it himself and
destroyed it. He could not pick it up, it was bloody; he leaned over
it, sighing: “Poor bird, poor bird, and is this your road to heaven? Or
do you never share the heaven that you make?” There was a little noise
then added to the leaping of the grasshoppers—it was the patter of
tears he was shedding from himself. Well, when the scholar heard that
he gave a good shout of laughter, and he was soon contented, forgetting
the bird. He was for sitting down awhile but the thought of the old man
Simon, with that sinful wallet—a rare budget of his own mad joys—urged
him on till he came by the end of the wood, the rain ceasing, and
beyond him the harmony of a flock roaming and bleating. Every ewe of
the flock had numbers painted on it, that ran all the way up to ninety
and nine.
Soon he came to the farmhouse and the kitchen and the odd sheep and a
kind girl with a knot of hair as thick as a twist of bread. He told her
the thing that was upon his conscience.
“Help me to come up with him, for I’m a day to the bad, and what shall
I do? I gave him a coat, an old coat, and all my sins were hidden in
it, but I’d forgotten them. He was an old quavering man with but three
spells of happiness in the earthly world.” He begged her to direct
him to the man Simon. The smiling girl gave him a good direction, the
joyful scholar hurried out and on, and in a score of minutes he was
peeping in the fine hut, with his hand on the latch of the half door,
and Simon snoring in bed, a quiet decent snore.
“Simon!” he calls, but he didn’t wake. He shook him, but he didn’t
budge. There was the coat hanging down from the iron peg, so he went
to it and searched it and took out the wallet. But when he opened it—a
black sowskin wallet it was, very strong with good straps—his sins were
all escaped from it, not one little sin left in the least chink of the
wallet, it was empty as a drum. The scholar knew something was wrong,
for it was full once, and quite full.
“Well, now,” thought he, scratching his head and searching his mind,
“did I make a mistake of it? Would they be by chance in the very coat
that is on me now, for I’ve not another coat to my name?” He gave it
a good strong search, in the patch pockets and the inside pockets and
in the purse on his belt, but there was not the scrap of a tail of a
sin of any sort, good or bad, in that coat, and all he found was a few
cachous against the roughening of his voice.
“Did I make another mistake of it,” he says again, “and put those
solemn sins in the fob of my fancy waistcoat? Where are they?” he
shouts out.
Simon lifted his head out of sleeping for a moment. “It was that girl
with the hair,” Simon said. “She took them from the wallet—they are not
allowed in this place—and threw them in the pigwash.”
With that he was asleep again, snoring his decent snore.
“Glory be to God,” said the scholar, “am I not a great fool to have
come to heaven looking for my sins!”
He took the empty wallet and tiptoed back to the world, and if he
is not with the saints yet, it is with the saints he will be one
day—barring he gets another budget of sins in his eager joy. And _that_
I wouldn’t deny him.
_The Tiger_
The tiger was coming at last; the almost fabulous beast, the subject of
so much conjecture for so many months, was at the docks twenty miles
away. Yak Pedersen had gone to fetch it, and Barnabe Woolf’s Menagerie
was about to complete its unrivalled collection by the addition of a
full-grown Indian tiger of indescribable ferocity, newly trapped in
the forest and now for the first time exhibited, and so on, and so on.
All of which, as it happened, was true. On the previous day Pedersen
the Dane and some helpers had taken a brand new four-horse exhibition
waggon, painted and carved with extremely legendary tigers lapped in
blood—even the bars were gilded—to convey this unmatchable beast to its
new masters. The show had had to wait a long time for a tiger, but it
had got a beauty at last, a terror indeed by all accounts, though it is
not to be imagined that everything recorded of it by Barnabe Woolf was
truth and nothing but truth. Showmen do not work in that way.
Yak Pedersen was the tamer and menagerie manager, a tall, blonde,
angular man about thirty-five, of dissolute and savage blood himself,
with the very ample kind of moustache that bald men often develop;
yes, bald, intemperate, lewd, and an interminable smoker of Cuban
cigarettes, which seemed constantly to threaten a conflagration in
that moustache. Marie the Cossack hated him, but Yak loved her with a
fierce deep passion. Nobody knew why she was called Marie the Cossack.
She came from Canning Town—everybody knew that, and her proper name
was Fascota, Mrs. Fascota, wife of Jimmy Fascota, who was the architect
and carpenter and builder of the show. Jimmy was not much to look at,
so little in fact that you couldn’t help wondering what it was Marie
had seen in him when she could have had the King of Poland, as you
might say, almost for the asking. But still Jimmy was the boss ganger
of the show, and even that young gentleman in frock coat and silk hat
who paraded the platform entrance to the arena and rhodomontadoed you
into it, often against your will, by the seductive recital of the seven
ghastly wonders of the world, all certainly to be seen, to be seen
inside, waiting to be seen, must be seen, roll up—even he was subject
to the commands of Jimmy Fascota when the time came to dismantle and
pack up the show, although the transfer of his activities involved
him temporarily in a change, a horrid change, of attire and language.
Marie was not a lady, but she was not for Pedersen anyway. She swore
like a factory foreman, or a young soldier, and when she got tipsy she
was full of freedoms. By the power of God she was beautiful, and by
the same gracious power she was virtuous. Her husband knew it; he knew
all about master Pedersen’s passion, too, and it did not even interest
him. Marie did feats in the lion cages, whipping poor decrepit beasts,
desiccated by captivity, through a hoop or over a stick of wood and
other kindergarten disportings; but there you are, people must live,
and Marie lived that way. Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he
was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him
he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice
would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too
deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off
with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid.
“God Almighty!” he would groan, “she is not good for me, this Marie.
What can I do for her? She is burning me alive and the Skaggerack could
not quench me, not all of it. The devil! What can I do with this? Some
day I shall smash her across the eyes, yes, across the eyes.”
So you see the man really loved her.
When Pedersen returned from the docks the car with its captive was
dragged to a vacant place in the arena, and the wooden front panel was
let down from the bars. The marvellous tiger was revealed. It sprung
into a crouching attitude as the light surprised the appalling beauty
of its smooth fox-coloured coat, its ebony stripes, and snowy pads and
belly. The Dane, who was slightly drunk, uttered a yell and struck the
bars of the cage with his whip. The tiger did not blench, but all the
malice and ferocity in the world seemed to congregate in its eyes and
impress with a pride and ruthless grandeur the colossal brutality of
its face. It did not move its body, but its tail gradually stiffened
out behind it as stealthily as fire moves in the forest undergrowth,
and the hair along the ridge of its back rose in fearful spikes. There
was the slightest possible distension of the lips, and it fixed its
marvellous baleful gaze upon Pedersen. The show people were hushed
into silence, and even Pedersen was startled. He showered a few howls
and curses at the tiger, who never ceased to fix him with eyes that
had something of contempt in them and something of a horrible presage.
Pedersen was thrusting a sharp spike through the bars when a figure
stepped from the crowd. It was an old negro, a hunchback with a white
beard, dressed in a red fez cap, long tunic of buff cotton, and blue
trousers. He laid both his hands on the spike and shook his head
deprecatingly, smiling all the while. He said nothing, but there was
nothing he could say—he was dumb.
“Let him alone, Yak; let the tiger alone, Yak!” cried Barnabe Woolf.
“What is this feller?”
Pedersen with some reluctance turned from the cage and said: “He is
come with the animal.”
“So?” said Barnabe. “Vell, he can go. Ve do not vant any black feller.”
“He cannot speak—no tongue—it is gone,” Yak replied.
“No tongue! Vot, have they cut him out?”
“I should think it,” said the tamer. “There was two of them, a white
keeper, but that man fell off the ship one night and they do not see
him any more. This chap he feed it and look after it. No information
of him, dumb you see, and a foreigner; don’t understand. He have no
letters, no money, no name, nowheres to go. Dumb, you see, he has
nothing, nothing but a flote. The captain said to take him away with
us. Give a job to him, he is a proposition.”
“Vot is he got you say?”
“Flote.” Pedersen imitated with his fingers and lips the actions of a
flute-player.
“O ya, a vloot! Vell, ve don’t want no vloots now; ve feeds our own
tigers, don’t ve, Yak?” And Mr. Woolf, oily but hearty—and well
he might be so for he was beautifully rotund, hair like satin,
extravagantly clothed, and rich with jewellery—surveyed first with
a contemplative grin, and then compassionately, the figure of the
old negro, who stood unsmiling with his hands crossed humbly before
him. Mr. Woolf was usually perspiring, and usually being addressed by
perspiring workmen, upon whom he bellowed orders and such anathemas as
reduced each recipient to the importance of a potato, and gave him the
aspect of a consumptive sheep. But to-day Mr. Woolf was affable and
calm. He took his cigar from his mouth and poured a flood of rich grey
air from his lips. “O ya, look after him a day, or a couple of days.”
At that one of the boys began to lead the hunchback away as if he were
a horse. “Come on, Pompoon,” he cried, and thenceforward the unknown
negro was called by that name.
Throughout the day the tiger was the sensation of the show, and
the record of its ferocity attached to the cage received thrilling
confirmation whenever Pedersen appeared before the bars. The sublime
concentration of hatred was so intense that children screamed, women
shuddered, and even men held their breath in awe. At the end of the
day the beasts were fed. Great hacks of bloody flesh were forked into
the bottoms of the cages, the hungry victims pouncing and snarling in
ecstasy. But no sooner were they served than the front panel of each
cage was swung up, and the inmate in the seclusion of his den slaked
his appetite and slept. When the public had departed the lights were
put out and the doors of the arena closed. Outside in the darkness
only its great rounded oblong shape could be discerned, built high
of painted wood, roofed with striped canvas, and adorned with flags.
Beyond this matchbox coliseum was a row of caravans, tents, naphtha
flares, and buckets of fire on which suppers were cooking. Groups of
the show people sat or lounged about, talking, cackling with laughter,
and even singing. No one observed the figure of Pompoon as he passed
silently on the grass. The outcast, doubly chained to his solitariness
by the misfortune of dumbness and strange nationality, was hungry. He
had not tasted food that day. He could not understand it any more than
he could understand the speech of these people. In the end caravan,
nearest the arena, he heard a woman quietly singing. He drew a shining
metal flute from his breast, but stood silently until the singer
ceased. Then he repeated the tune very accurately and sweetly on his
flute. Marie the Cossack came to the door in her green silk tights
and high black boots with gilded fringes; her black velvet doublet
had plenty of gilded buttons upon it. She was a big, finely moulded
woman, her dark and splendid features were burned healthily by the
sun. In each of her ears two gold discs tinkled and gleamed as she
moved. Pompoon opened his mouth very widely and supplicatingly; he
put his hand upon his stomach and rolled his eyes so dreadfully that
Mrs. Fascota sent her little daughter Sophy down to him with a basin
of soup and potatoes. Sophy was partly undressed, in bare feet and red
petticoat. She stood gnawing the bone of a chicken, and grinning at
the black man as he swallowed and dribbled as best he could without
a spoon. She cried out: “Here, he’s going to eat the bloody basin
and all, mum!” Her mother cheerfully ordered her to “give him those
fraggiments, then!” The child did so, pausing now and again to laugh
at the satisfied roll of the old man’s eyes. Later on Jimmy Fascota
found him a couple of sacks, and Pompoon slept upon them beneath
their caravan. The last thing the old man saw was Pedersen, carrying
a naphtha flare, unlocking a small door leading into the arena, and
closing it with a slam after he had entered. Soon the light went out.
II