WEIGHT CARRIERS
Fifty years ago, when the burning of a bishop at Smithfield would
scarce have created more sensation in clerical circles than a
Ritualistic Commission or a Pan-Anglican Synod, our divines took their
share of secular pastime far more freely than at present. It was the
parson who killed his thirty brace of partridges, and this, too, with a
flint-and-steel gun, over dogs of his own breaking, on the broiling 1st
of September. It was the parson who alone got to the end of that famous
five-and-forty minutes from “The Church Spinneys,” when a large field
were beat off to a man, and the squire broke his horse’s back. It was
the parson who knew more about rearing pheasants, circumventing wild
ducks, otter-hunting, fly-fishing, even rat-catching, than any one else
in the parish; and it was the parson, too, who sometimes took the odds
about a flyer at Newmarket, and landed a good stake by backing his own
sound ecclesiastical opinion.
Concerning one of these racing divines I remember the following
anecdote:—
Returning from afternoon service on a Sunday, he happened to witness a
trial of speed between two of his school-children. Unequally matched in
size, the big boy, as was natural, beat the little one, but only by a
couple of yards. The parson stood still, watched them approvingly, and
meditated.
“Come here,” said he to the winner. “Go into my study, and fetch me my
big Bible.”
The urchin obeyed, and returned bearing a ponderous quarto volume.
“Now,” continued his reverence, “start fair, and run it over again.”
The competitors wished no better fun, and finished this time with a
dead heat.
“Good boys! Good boys!” said the parson, reflectively. “Ah! I thought
the weight would bring you together.”
Yes; how surely the weight brings us together! How often have we not
seen the universal handicap run out over the course of daily life? Some
of us start so free, so light-hearted, so full of hope and confidence,
expecting no less than to gallop in alone. Presently the weight begins
to tell; the weight that we have voluntarily accepted, or the weight
imposed on us by the wisdom of superior judgment. We labour, we
struggle, we fail; we drop back to those whom we thought so meanly of
as our competitors; they reach us, they pass us, and though punishment
be not spared, they gain the post at last, perhaps many, many lengths
ahead! And even if we escape the disgrace of having thus to succumb,
even if our powers be equal to the tax imposed on them, we are not to
expect an easy victory; there is no “winning in a canter” here. Every
effort tells on mettle, nerve, and spirits; on heart, body, and brain.
We want them all, we summon them, we use them freely, and then, it may
be within one stride of victory, comes the cruel and irretrievable
breakdown.
Men, like horses, must be content to carry weight. Like horses, too,
though some are far more adapted than others to the purpose, all learn
in time to accommodate themselves, so to speak, in pace and action
to their inevitable burden. How they fight under it at first! How
eager, and irritable, and self-willed it renders them; how violent and
impetuous, as if in haste to get the whole thing over and done with.
But in a year or two the back accustoms itself to the burden; the head
is no longer borne so high, the proud neck bends to the curb, and
though the stride be shortened, the dashing, bird-like buoyancy gone
for ever, a gentle, docile temper has taken its place, with sufficient
courage and endurance for all reasonable requirements left. Neither
animal, indeed, is ever so brilliant again; but thus it is that both
become steady, plodding, useful creatures, fit to perform honestly and
quietly their respective duties in creation.
We think we know a great deal in England of athletics, pedestrianism,
and the art of training in general. It may astonish us to learn how a
Chinese postman gets himself into condition for the work he has to do.
The Celestials, it would appear, like meaner mortals, are extremely
particular, not to say fidgety, about the due transmission of their
correspondence. Over that vast empire extend postal arrangements,
conducted, I believe, as in our own country, by some mandarin of high
rank, remarkable for their regularity and efficiency. The letters
travel at a uniform rate of more than seven English miles an hour; and
as they are conveyed by runners on foot, often through thinly-populated
districts in which it is impossible to establish frequent relays,
the pedestrian capabilities of these postmen are of the greatest
importance. This is how a Chinaman prepares himself to accomplish his
thirty miles in less than four hours.
He has a quantity of bags constructed which he disposes over his whole
person, like Queen Mab’s pinches—
“Arms, legs, back, shoulders, sides, and shins.”
Into these he dribbles handfuls of flour before he starts for walking
exercise, increasing the quantity little by little every day till
the bags are quite full, and he carries clinging to every part of
his body several pounds of dead weight, nor considers himself fit
for his situation till he can move under it with the freedom and
elasticity of a naked man. He will then tell you that, on throwing off
his self-imposed burden, he finds all his muscles so invigorated by
their own separate labours, his strength so stimulated, his wind so
clear, his condition so perfect, that he shoots away over the plains,
mountains, and tea-gardens of the Flowery Land less like John Chinaman
with a letter-bag than an arrow from a bow. What would our old friend
Captain Barclay, of peripatetic memory, say to such a system as this?
I doubt if the Chinaman’s theory of training be founded on sound
principles; but I am quite sure that in bearing our moral burden we
cannot dispose it over too extended a surface, or in too many separate
parcels. I see fathers of families carrying surprising weights, such
as make the bachelor’s hair stand on end from sheer dismay, with a
buoyancy of step and carelessness of demeanour only to be accounted for
by an equal distribution of pressure over the entire victim. A man who
has his own business to attend to, his domestic affairs to regulate,
half-a-dozen hungry children to feed, and a couple of poor relations or
so to assist with sympathy, counsel, and occasional aid, finds no time
to dwell upon any one difficulty, no especial inconvenience from any
one burden, because each has its fellow and its counterpoise elsewhere.
It is not only in pharmacy that the principle of counter-irritation
produces beneficial results. A man with two grievances never pities
himself so much as a man with one; and a man with half-a-dozen treats
them all with a good-humoured indifference little removed from positive
satisfaction.
Some people even appear to glory in the multitude of their afflictions,
as though the power to sustain so much ill-luck shed a certain
reflected lustre on themselves. I recollect, long ago, meeting an old
comrade hanging about the recruiting taverns in Westminster. The man
was a clean, smart, active, efficient non-commissioned officer enough,
with the average courage and endurance of the British dragoon. A year
before I had parted with him, languid, unhappy, and depressed, longing
only to return to England but not yet under orders for home. Now he
looked cheerful, contented, almost radiant. I stopped to inquire after
his welfare.
“I landed a fortnight ago, sir,” said he, with something of triumph in
his voice, “and a happy home I found waiting for me! I haven’t a friend
or a relation left in the world. My father’s absconded, my mother’s
dead, my brother-in-law’s ruined, and my sister gone into a mad-house!”
It sounded melancholy enough, yet I felt convinced the man reaped some
unaccountable consolation from his pre-eminence in misfortune, admired
his own endurance, and was proud of his power to carry so heavy a
weight.
Custom, no doubt, in these as in all other inflictions, will do much to
lighten the load. There is a training of the mind, as of the body, to
bear and to endure. With wear and tear the heart gets hardened like the
muscles, and the feelings become blunted by ill-usage, just as the skin
grows callous on an oarsman’s hands. There is some shadow of truth in
the fallacious story of him who carried a calf every day till it became
a cow. None of us know what we can do till we try; and there are few
but would follow the example of the patient camel, and refuse to rise
from the sand, if they knew how heavy a weight is to be imposed on them
ere they can reach the longed-for diamond of the desert, gushing and
glittering amongst the palms! It is fortunate for us that the packages
are not all piled up at once. Little by little we accustom ourselves to
the labour as we plod sullenly on with the tinkling caravan, ignorant,
till too late to turn back, of the coming hardships, the endless
journey, or the many times that cruel _mirage_ must disappoint our
fainting, thirsting spirits ere we reach the welcome resting-place
where the cool spring bubbles through its fringe of verdure—where
we shall drink our fill of those life-bestowing waters, and stretch
ourselves out at last for long, unbroken slumbers under the “shadow of
a great rock in a weary land.”
But the worst method of all in which to carry our load is to build it
up on the pack-saddle so as to attract notice and commiseration from
those who travel alongside. The Turkish _hamals_, indeed, may be seen
staggering about Constantinople under enormous bales of merchandise,
twice the height and apparently three times the weight of the herculean
bearer; but a Turkish _hamal_, notwithstanding his profession, ignores
the meaning of a sore back, moral or physical. Other jades may wince,
but, under all circumstances, you may swear _his_ withers are unwrung.
To be sure, the first article of his creed is resignation. Fatalism
lulls him like opium, though, kinder than that pernicious drug, it
leaves no torment of reaction to succeed its soothing trance. Hard
work, hard fare, hard bed, hard words, hard lines in general, a
tropical sun and the atmosphere of a jungle, it is all in the day’s
work with _him_! _Backsheesh_ he will accept with a smile if he can get
it, or he will do without, consoling himself that it is _kismet_, for
“There is one God, and Mahomet is His prophet.” With this philosopher,
indeed, “a contented mind is a perpetual feast,” otherwise how could
he sustain his stalwart proportions on a morsel of black bread and
a slice of watermelon? His dissipations, too, are mild as his daily
meals. A screw of weak tobacco, folded in a paper cigarette, wraps him
in a foretaste of his anticipated paradise; a mouthful of thick, black,
bitter coffee stands him in lieu of beer, porter, half-and-half, early
purl, blue ruin, and dog’s-nose. Once a week, or maybe once a month,
he goes to the bath for two hours of uninterrupted enjoyment, emerging
healthy, happy, refreshed, and clean as a new pin.
Perhaps it is his frugal, temperate life, perhaps it is his calm,
acquiescent disposition, that enables him thus to carry weight so
complacently. He never fights under it, not he! Through the narrow
lanes of Stamboul, across the vibrating wooden bridge of the Golden
Horn, up the filthy stairs, not streets, of Pera, he swings along with
regulated step and snorting groans, delivered in discordant cadence
at each laborious footfall; but he carries his weight, that is the
great point—he carries a great deal of it, and he carries it remarkably
well—an example of humility and patience to the Christian who employs
him, an object of comparison, not much in favour of the latter, between
the votaries of the Crescent and the Cross.
When I protest, however, against making a display and a grievance of
the load you have to bear, I am far from maintaining that you are to
keep it a profound secret, and hide it away in unsuitable places under
your clothes. A man can carry a hundred-weight on his shoulders with
less inconvenience than a few pounds about his heart. If you doubt
this, order cold plum-pudding for luncheon, and you will be convinced!
A secret, too, is always a heavy substance to take abroad with you, and
your own seems to incommode you more than another’s, probably because
you are less indifferent about letting it fall. As for attempting to
dance lightly along with the jaunty air of an unweighted novice, be
assured the effort is not only painful but ridiculous. No, never be
ashamed of your burden, not even though your own folly should have
clapped an additional half-hundred on the top of it. Get your shoulders
well under the heaviest part, walk as upright as you may, but do not
try to swagger; and if you have a friend who likes you well enough to
give his assistance, let him catch hold at one end, and so between you
move on with it the best way you can.
Some packages grow all the lighter, like a contraband trunk at the
Douane, for being weighed and examined, or, as our neighbours call it,
“pierced and plumbed.” Some again gather increased proportions when we
enlarge upon them; but it is only those of which we dare not speak,
those which no friend must seem to see, for which no brother must offer
a hand, that sink our failing strength, that crush us down humbled and
helpless in the mire. There is but one place for such burdens as these,
and we never lay them there till we have tried everything else in vain;
just as we offer the remnants of a life from which we expect no more
pleasure, where we ought to have given all the promise and vigour of
our youth, or take an aching, hopeless, worn-out heart back to our only
friend, as the crying child runs to its parent with a broken toy.
“The ox toils through the furrow,
Obedient to the goad;
The patient ass up flinty paths
Plods with its weary load,”
says Macaulay in his glorious _Lays of Ancient Rome_, and something in
the nature of both these animals fits them especially for the endurance
of labour and the imposition of weight. It is well for a man when he
has a little of the bovine repose of character, a good deal of the
asinine thickness of skin and insensibility to hard usage. Such a
disposition toils on contentedly enough, obedient indeed to the goad
so far as moderately to increase the staid solemnity of his gait,
taking the flinty path and the weary load as necessary conditions of
life, with a serene equanimity for which he has the philosophical
example of the ass! The ways are rough, you know, and the journey long.
Depend upon it these animals arrive at its termination with less wear
and tear, more safety, and even more despatch, than the sensitive,
high-spirited, and courageous horse, wincing from the lash, springing
to the voice, striving, panting, sweating, straining every muscle to
get home.
In the parable of the _Ancient Mariner_—for is it not indeed the
wildest, dreamiest, and most poetical of parables?—you remember the
hopelessness of the weight he carried when
“Instead of the cross the albatross
About his neck was hung.”
It was not his misfortune, you see, but his crime that bore him
down. Its consciousness lay far heavier on his spirit than did his
after-punishment, when, weary and desolate, he wailed that he was
“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea,
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.”
The saints, indeed, might not have heard him; how do we know about
that? but he _was_ heard nevertheless, and thus he got rid of his
burden to raise his head once more in the face of heaven.
He looked upon beauty, nature, animate life, the wonders of the deep,
the creatures of his Maker, and “blessed them unaware!”
Enough. The hideous dream vanishes, the unholy spell is broken, and he
cries exulting—
“That self-same moment I could pray,
And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off, and sunk
Like lead into the sea.”
I sometimes think that women bear their burdens with less apparent
struggle, less toil or complaint than men; and this although they
own more of the horse’s anxious temperament than the sluggish nature
of the ox and the ass. If they have less “nerve” than ourselves—less
of the coolness which springs from constitutional insensibility to
danger—they have more of that mettlesome spirit which is sometimes
called “pluck,” that indomitable courage which acknowledges no failure
for defeat, which never sleeps upon its post, which can bear up bravely
even against the sickness and depression of unremitting pain. It is
proverbial that in all phases of mere bodily suffering they show twice
the patience and twice the fortitude of the stronger sex; while who
shall say how much of silent sorrow they can cherish and conceal in
troubled hearts while they go about their daily business with smiles on
their gentle faces, with a tranquil, staid demeanour seeming to chant
in soft, harmonious cadence the watchword of “All’s Well!”
Do you not think they too keep their favourite skeletons (far less
perfect than yourself) hoarded, hidden away, locked up, but not to be
buried or forgotten for the worth of kingdoms? Do you suppose they
never bring them out to be hugged, and fondled, and worshipped, and
wept over?
“In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”
Bah! It is a world of shams. If a woman is not a hypocrite she must be
a stone!
We should give them greater credit though could we learn more of
the weights they have to carry. But their training is known only to
themselves; their trials come off in secret; the saddles they wear are
jealously locked up, and they take care to keep the key! I think the
reason they run so kindly is that they apply themselves very frequently
to the last resource of the Ancient Mariner when he saw no escape from
his punishment, when he was overweighted with his curse.
I know not: I only know that the quiet courage, the generous spirit,
the untiring endurance with which they perform the journey of life is
too generally ignored, unappreciated, and thrown away. How often have
we not seen a thorough-bred horse ridden by a butcher? a being little
lower than an angel submitting, gentle and patient, to a creature
little higher than a brute.