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Bones and I
[Illustration: “Contemplating my companion.” Page 65.)
_Bones and I._] [_Frontispiece_
]
Bones and I
or
The Skeleton at Home
By
G. J. Whyte-Melville
Author of “Market Harborough,” “Katerfelto,” “Cerise,”
“Satanella,” etc.
Illustrated by A. Forestier
London
Ward, Lock & Co., Limited
New York and Melbourne
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
Introduction 7
I. “On Waste” 15
II. Through the Mill 32
III. Gourds 48
IV. A Vampire 65
V. Gold for Silver 102
VI. A Day that is Dead 122
VII. The Four-leaved Shamrock 140
VIII. Rus in Urbe 162
IX. Haunted 184
X. Weight Carriers 201
XI. Shadows 220
XII. Guinevere 237
‘BONES AND I’
_OR, THE SKELETON AT HOME_
INTRODUCTION
Long ago, visiting the monastery of La Trappe, I was struck with
the very discontented appearance of its inmates. In some of their
faces, indeed, I detected no expression whatever, but on none could
I perceive the slightest gleam of satisfaction with their lot. No
wonder: few men are of the stuff that makes a good recluse. The human
animal is naturally gregarious, like the solan goose, the buffalo,
the monkey, or the mackerel. Put him by himself, he pines for lack of
mental aliment, just as a flower fades for want of daylight in the
dark. A multitude of fools forms an inspiriting spectacle, a solitary
specimen becomes a sad and solemn warning. If the Trappists, who are
not entirely isolated from their kind, thus wither under the rigour
of those repressive rules enjoined by the Order, what must have been
the condition of such hermits and anchorites as passed whole months,
and even years together, in the wilderness, unvisited by anything more
human than the distempered phantoms of their dreams? No shave, no
wash, no morning greeting, and no evening wine. How many, I wonder,
preserved their sanity in the ordeal? How many, returning dazed and
bewildered to the haunts of men, tottered about in helpless, wandering,
maundering imbecility? Were there not some hard, boisterous natures who
plunged wildly into the excesses of a world so long forsworn, with all
the appetite of abstinence, all the reckless self-abandonment of the
paid-off man-of-war’s man on a spree? No; few people are qualified for
recluses. I am proud to be amongst the number.
I live in a desert, but my desert is in the very heart of London. The
waste is all round me though; I have taken good care of that. Once,
indeed, it blossomed like the rose, for a thousand fertilising streams
trickled through its bright expanse. Do not you as I did. I turned all
the streams into one channel, “in the sweet summer-time long ago,” and
“sat by the river,” like those poor fools in the song, and said, “Go
to! Now I shall never thirst again!” But in the night there came a
landslip from the upper level, and choked the river, turning its course
through my neighbour’s pastures, so that the meadows, once so green and
fresh, are bare and barren now for evermore. I speak in parables, of
course; and the value of “this here observation,” like those of Captain
Bunsby, “lies in the application of it.” I need not observe, the street
in which I hide myself is a _cul de sac_. A man who sells chickweed,
perhaps I should say, who would sell chickweed if he could, is the only
passenger. Of the houses on each side of me, one is unfinished, the
other untenanted. Over the way, I confront the dead wall at the back
of an hospital. Towards dusk in the late autumn, when the weather is
breaking, I must admit the situation is little calculated to generate
over-exuberance of animal spirits. Sequestered, no doubt, shady too,
particularly in the short days, and as remote from the noise or traffic
of the town as John o’ Groat’s house, but enlivening—No.
On first beginning to reside here, I confess I felt at times a little
lonely and depressed. Therefore I brought home “Bones” to come and live
with me. And who _is_ “Bones”? Ah! that is exactly what I have never
been able to find out. Contemplative, affable, easily pleased, and an
admirable listener, he is yet on some points reserved to a degree that
might almost be termed morose; while in his personal appearance there
is a dignity of bearing, an imposing presence, which forbids the most
intimate associate to attempt a liberty.
I will describe him as I see him at this moment, reclining in an easy
attitude on the cushions of my favourite arm-chair, benevolently
interested, it would seem, in my lightest movements, while I sit
smoking silently by the fire. Neither of us are great talkers quite so
early in the evening.
He is a well-formed and very complete skeleton of middle height—perfect
in every respect, and in all his articulations, with the exception of
two double teeth absent from the upper jaw. The arch of his lower ribs
is peculiarly symmetrical, and his vertebræ are put in with a singular
combination of flexibility and strength. As I look at him now leaning
back in a graceful attitude, with one thigh-bone thrown carelessly
over the other, he reminds me of so many people I knew when I lived
in the world, that I seem to fancy myself once more a denizen of that
revolving purgatory which goes by the name of general society. Poor
A—— was almost as fleshless, B—— much more taciturn, and C—— decidedly
not so good-looking. “Bones,” however, possesses a quality that I have
never found in any other companion. His tact is beyond praise. Under no
circumstances does he become a bore—that is why we get on so admirably
together. Like a ghost, he speaks only when spoken to. Unlike a wife,
refrains from monopolising the last word. If he didn’t rattle so on the
slightest movement—a fault of anatomy, indeed, rather than temper—as a
companion he would be—perfection.
It is a dull, close evening. Were it not so near winter one might
predict a thunderstorm. The smoke from my meerschaum winds upwards in
thin blue wreaths, uninfluenced by a breath of outward air, though
the windows are open to the deserted street, black and silent as the
grave. My lamp is not yet lit (we both affect a congenial gloom), the
fire is burning out, but there is a dull red glow like a fever-spot
lowering under a volcanic arch of cinders; and looking into it
with unwinking eyes, I see the long-drawn, weary, beaten road that
leads backward through a life. I see a child set down to run alone,
half-frightened, laughing, trusting, almost happy, and altogether
gay. I see a youth bold, healthful, courageous, full of an impossible
chivalry, a romantic generosity that delights to lavish no matter
what—money, love, hope, happiness, coining heart and intellect into
gold that he may squander it on the passers-by. I see a strong man
crushed—a proud head grovelling in the dust, a high spirit broken, a
cowering wretch imploring that his punishment may be lightened ever
such a little, trembling and wincing like a slave beneath the scourge.
At this moment the fire falls in with a crash, while a pale yellow
flame leaps flickering out of the midst, and starting from my seat
to light our lamp for the rest of the evening, I demand aloud, “What
then is the purpose of Creation? From a quenched rushlight to an
extinct volcano, from the squeak of a mouse to yesterday’s leading
article, from a mite smothered in a cheese to an Emperor murdered in
Mexico, is the march of Time but the destructive progress of a bull in
a china-shop? Are the recurring centuries but so many ciphers added
to the sum of a thriftless, objectless expenditure? Is the so-called
economy of the universe but an unbridled, haphazard course of boundless
and incalculable waste?”
His backbone creaks uncomfortably while he moves in his chair. “Waste?”
he repeats in the hushed, placid tones that make him so invaluable as
a companion—“Waste? The subject is by no means limited. I have some
experience in it of my own. Would you favour me with your ideas?”—and I
go off at score with—
CHAPTER I
“ON WASTE”
“Why are these things so?” I exclaim, plumping down again into my
seat. “Why have the times been out of joint ever since Hamlet’s first
appearance on the stage, with black tights and rosettes in his shoes?
Why is the whole world still at sixes and sevens? What is the object
of it all? _Cui bono? cui bono? cui bono?_ Is there the slightest
appearance of a result? Any tendency towards a goal? Shall we ever
get _anywhere_, or are we travelling perpetually in a circle, like
squirrels in a cage, convicted pickpockets on the treadmill? By the
way, who convicted the pickpockets, and sentenced them? The sitting
magistrate, of course; and do the awards of that worthy functionary
produce any definite result in the direction of good order and
morality, or must his daily incubation, too, be wasted upon addled
eggs? Do you remember the story of the man who cut his throat because
he was so tired of dressing and undressing every day? Don’t shake
your head—I beg pardon, your skull—you told it me yourself. I can
appreciate his prejudices, but how did he know there might not be
buttons and buttonholes where he was going? That is, supposing he went
anywhere—if he didn’t, he was wasted altogether. If he did, perhaps he
was of no use when he got there. Wasted again—only a human life after
all. Not much when you think of it amongst the millions that cling
about this old globe of ours, rising, swarming, disappearing like the
maggots on a dead horse, but of no light importance to the bearer when
you remember its weight of sorrows, anxieties, disappointments, and
responsibilities, not to mention the Black Care sitting heavily at the
top to keep the whole burden in its place. Life is a bubble, they say.
Very well—-but is it blown from a soap-dish by a school-boy, rising
heavenward, tinted with rainbow hues, to burst only when at its most
beautiful and its best? Or is it not rather a bubble gurgling to the
surface from the agonised lungs of some struggling wretch drowning far
below in the dark, pitiless water,
‘Unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown’?
—Wasted, too, unless the fish eat him, and then who knows? None of us
perhaps may ever eat the fish.
“Listen to me. I won’t make your flesh creep, for unanswerable reasons.
I don’t even think I shall freeze the marrow in your bones. I could
tell you some strange stories, but I dare say your own experiences
are more remarkable than mine. I will only ask you to reflect on the
amount of suffering that came under our daily notice when we lived in
the world, and say whether every pang of mind or body, every tear shed
or swallowed down, every groan indulged or repressed, were anything
but sheer waste? Can you not recall a hundred instances of strength
sapped by drink, of intellect warped by madness, of beauty fading under
neglect, or withered by disappointment? Here a pair of lives are wasted
because they must needs run out their course in different grooves—there
two more are utterly thrown away, because, encompassed in a golden
link, they can by no means shake themselves free. The fairest of all,
it may be, and the most promising, never blooms into perfection for
want of its congenial comrade (wasted too, perhaps, at the antipodes),
and failing thus to reach maturity, dwindles, dwarfed and unmated, to
the grave. Think of Beauty wasted on the Beast—the Beast, too, utterly
out of his element, that he must roll on the garden sward rather than
labour in the teeming furrow. Look at Hercules spell-bound in the lap
of Omphale, broad-fronted Antony enervated by black-browed Cleopatra.
Consider the many Messrs. Caudle who lavish as much good-humour as
would set up a dozen households on their legal nightmares, and do not
forget poor Miss Prettyman pining in lonely spinsterhood over the way.
See the mother training up her child, impressing on him, far more
forcibly than she feels them for herself, lessons of honour, truth,
probity, and the unspeakable blessing of faith—praying her heart out
for that wilful little urchin, night and morning on her knees. A good
Christian with humble hopes of heaven, does she know that, far more
lavishly than those heathen termagants in hell, she is pouring water in
a sieve? Does she know she may live to see that smooth, soft, wondering
brow scored deep with sorrow, or lowering black with sin—that round
rosy cheek hollowed by depravity, or bloated with excess? Worst of all,
the merry, guileless heart embittered by falsehood, and hardened with
ill-usage till it has ceased to feel for others, even for itself! Great
Heaven! have we not seen them—these simple, honest, manly hearts,
taken by some soft-eyed demon with loving ways, and sweet angelic
smile, to be kept carefully, to be watched jealously, till their fabric
has been thoroughly studied, then broken deftly and delicately, yet
with such nice art that they can never mend again, and so, politely
‘Returned, with thanks’?
“Forgive me: on such anatomical outrages I have no right to expect you
should feel so warmly as myself.
“Millions of creatures, beautiful exceedingly, scour over the desert
plains of explored Africa; in its unknown regions, millions more may
be supposed to feed, and gambol, and die. What is the use of them? If
you come to that, what was the use of the Emperor Theodore, or the King
of the Cannibal Islands, or any other potentate who remains utterly
unimpressed when we threaten ‘to break off diplomatic relations’?
“Myriads of insects wheel about us in the sun’s declining rays every
summer’s evening. Again, what is the use of them? What is the use
of the dragon-fly, the bumble-bee, the speckled toad, the blue-nosed
monkey, the unicorn, the wild elephant,—or, indeed, the Ojibbeway
Indians?”
Here, contrary to his custom, “Bones” interrupted me in full career.
“One moment,” said he, with his courteous grin. “Allow me to point
out that yours is inadmissible, as being simply an _argumentum ad
absurdum_. It would hold equally good with Léotard, Mr. Beales, or any
other public exhibitor—nay, you might advance it for suppression of the
Lord Mayor or the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
He bowed reverentially while he mentioned the last-named dignitary; and
I confess I was inclined to admit the truth of his remark.
“Then I waive the question,” I replied, “as regards the brute creation,
though I think I could find something to say, too, about the weasel
sucking rabbits, the heron gobbling fish, the hawk striking its quarry,
or the hounds running into their fox. But we will suppose that the
whole animal world, from the angler’s lob-worm to the costermonger’s
donkey, is enjoying its paradise _here_, and return to our own kind,
their sorrows, their sufferings, and, natural consequence of sorrow and
suffering, their sins.”
He shook his skull gently, and muttered something in his spinal
vertebræ about “a cart” and “a horse,” but I took no notice, and
proceeded with dignity—
“I have learnt my Latin Grammar, and almost the only one of its
precepts I have not forgotten impresses on me that—
‘Spades turn up wealth, the stimulant of crime.’
I suppose you will not dispute that the root of all evil is money?”
“Most emphatically,” he exclaimed, and his articulations rattled with
startling vehemence. “Most emphatically I deny the position. A man may
roll in wealth and be none the worse for it. On the contrary, poverty,
but for the unremitting labour it demands, would be far more conducive
to crime than a sufficiency, or even a superfluity of means. No; the
real enemy with whom every man has to contend confronts him in the
morning at his glass, and sticks persistently to him throughout the
day. The source of most unhappiness, the cause of all ill-doing, the
universal origin of evil, is _not_ money, but self——”
“You mean selfishness,” I retorted; “and I am surprised to hear a
man of the world—I mean of the _other_ world, or, indeed, of _any_
world whatever—assert so obvious a fallacy. Just as the liver, and
not the heart, is the seat of our real well-being, so I maintain that
self-indulgence, and not self-sacrifice, is the origin, the mainspring,
the motive power of all effort, progress, improvement, moral, social,
and physical. Researches of science, triumphs of art, masterpieces of
genius,—what are these but results of the same instinct that directs
the bee to the flower-garden, the vulture to the carcase? To eat is the
first necessity of man. He labours that he may live. Grant this, as
you cannot but concede the position to be unassailable, and you talk to
me in vain of sentiment, philanthropy, benevolence, all the loathsome
affectations of sympathy with which the earth-worm tries to impose upon
its kind. A man begins by being honest. Why? Because without honesty,
down the particular groove in which he spins, he cannot earn his daily
bread. When he has enough of this and to spare, he turns his attention
to decent apparel, a commodious house, a general appearance of
respectability; that is, he aims at being respectable—in other words,
at imposing on those who have been less successful in the universal
scramble than himself. Soon he buys a warming-pan, a Dutch oven, china
ornaments for his chimney-piece, and the History of the Prodigal to
hang about his walls. By degrees, as wealth increases, he moves into a
larger residence, he rolls upon wheels, he replaces the china ornaments
with a French clock; the Prodigal Son with modern oil-paintings, and
hides the warming-pan in the housemaid’s closet up-stairs. About this
period he begins to subscribe to charitable institutions, to give away
what he does not want, to throw little pellets of bread at the monster
who is always famished and always roaring out of doors, lest it should
come in, and snatch the roast beef off his table. Some day a team of
black horses with nodding plumes, and a red-nosed driver, come to take
him away, ‘very much respected,’ and, forgive the personality, there
is an end of him, as far as _we_ are concerned. Will you tell me that
man’s life has not been a continual concession to self?—waste, waste,
utter waste, from the pap-boat that preserved his infancy, to the
brass-nailed coffin that protects his putridity from contact with the
earth to which he returns? Why his very virtues, as he called them,
were but payments, so to speak, keeping up the insurance for his own
benefit, which he persuaded himself he had effected on the other world.
“Now, supposing the pap-boat had been withheld, or the nurse had tucked
him into his cradle upside down, or—thus saving some harmless woman
a deal of inconvenience and trouble—supposing he had never been born
at all, would he have been missed, or wanted? Would not the world
have gone on just as well without him? Has not his whole existence
been a mistake? The food he ate, the clothes he wore, the house he
lived in—were not these simply wasted? His efforts were waste, his
wear-and-tear of body and mind were waste, above all, his sorrows and
his sufferings were sheer, unpardonable waste. Yes; here I take my
stand. I leave you every enjoyment to be found in creation, physical,
moral, and intellectual. I make you a present of the elephant wallowing
in his mud-bath, and the midge wheeling in the sun; I give you Juliet
at her window, and Archimedes in his study; but I reserve the whale
in her death-flurry, and the worm on its hook. I appeal to Jephthah
sorrowing for his darling, and Rachel weeping for her children. I
repeat, if that self-care, which indeed constitutes our very identity,
be the object of existence, then all those tearful eyes that blur the
light of every rising sun—all those aching hearts that long only for
night to be eternal—are but so many witnesses to the predominance in
creation of a lavish and unaccountable waste.”
Like many thoughtful and deliberate natures, I am persuaded that in
early life “Bones” must have been a snuff-taker. He affects a trick of
holding his fleshless finger and thumb pressed together and suspended
in air, before he delivers himself of an opinion, that can only have
originated in a practice he has since been compelled, for obvious
reasons, to forego. Pausing during several seconds in this favourite
attitude, he sank gravely back in his chair, and replied—
“False logic, my good friend. False premises, and a false conclusion.
I deny them all; but the weather, even in _my_ light attire, feels
somewhat too close for wordy warfare. Besides, I hold with you, that
an ounce of illustration is worth a pound of argument. I will ask you,
therefore, as I know you have been in Cheshire, High Leicestershire,
and other cattle-feeding countries, whether you ever watched a
dairymaid making a cheese? If so, you must have observed how strong
and pitiless a pressure is required to wring the moisture out of its
very core. My friend, the human heart is like a cheese! To be good for
anything, the black drop must be wrung out of it, however tight the
squeeze required, however exquisite the pain. Therefore it is, that we
so often see the parable of the poor man’s ewe lamb enacted in daily
life. One, having everything the world can bestow, is nevertheless
further endowed with that which his needy brother would give all the
rest of the world to possess. For the first, the pressure has not yet
been put on, though his time, too, may come by-and-by. For the second,
that one darling hope, it may be, represents the little black drop
left, and so it must be wrung out, though the heart be crushed into
agony in the process. You talk of suffering being pure waste; I tell
you it is all pure gain. You talk of self as the motive to exertion; I
tell you it is the abnegation of self which has wrought out all that
is noble, all that is good, all that is useful, nearly all that is
ornamental in the world. Shut the house-door on him, and the man must
needs go forth to work in the fields. It is not the dreamer wrapped in
his fancied bliss, from whom you are to expect heroic efforts, either
of mind or body. You must dig your goad into the ox to make him use
his latent strength; you must drive your spurs into the horse to get
out of him his utmost speed. Wake the dreamer roughly—drive spurs and
goad into his heart. He will wince and writhe, and roll and gnash his
teeth, but I defy him to lie still. He must up and be doing, from sheer
torture, flying to one remedy after another till he gets to work, and
so finds distraction, solace, presently comfort, and, after a while,
looking yet higher, hope, happiness, and reward.
“Self, indeed! He is fain to forget self, because that therewith
is bound up so much, it would drive him mad to remember; and thus
sorrow-taught, he merges his own identity in the community of which
he is but an atom, taking his first step, though at a humble and
immeasurable distance, in the sacred track of self-sacrifice, on which,
after more than eighteen hundred years, the footprints are still fresh,
still ineffaceable. Waste, forsooth! Let him weep his heart out if he
will! I tell you that the deeper the furrows are scored, the heavier
shall be the harvest, the richer the garnered grain. I tell you, not
a tear falls but it fertilises some barren spot, from which hereafter
shall come up the fresh verdure of an eternal spring in that region
‘Where there’s fruit in the gardens of heaven, from the hope that
on earth was betrayed;
Where there’s rest for the soul, life-wearied, that hath striven,
and suffered, and prayed.’
“I’m rather tired. I won’t discuss the question any further. I’ll go
back into my cupboard, if you please. Good-night!”