At a little station, which I decline to specify, somewhere between
Oxford and Guildford, I missed a connection or miscalculated a route
in such manner that I was left stranded for rather more than an hour.
I adore waiting at railway stations, but this was not a very sumptuous
specimen. There was nothing on the platform except a chocolate automatic
machine, which eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no corresponding
chocolate, and a small paper-stall with a few remaining copies of a
cheap imperial organ which we will call the Daily Wire. It does not
matter which imperial organ it was, as they all say the same thing.
Though I knew it quite well already, I read it with gravity as I
strolled out of the station and up the country road. It opened with the
striking phrase that the Radicals were setting class against class. It
went on to remark that nothing had contributed more to make our Empire
happy and enviable, to create that obvious list of glories which you can
supply for yourself, the prosperity of all classes in our great cities,
our populous and growing villages, the success of our rule in Ireland,
etc., etc., than the sound Anglo-Saxon readiness of all classes in the
State “to work heartily hand-in-hand.” It was this alone, the paper
assured me, that had saved us from the horrors of the French Revolution.
“It is easy for the Radicals,” it went on very solemnly, “to make jokes
about the dukes. Very few of these revolutionary gentlemen have given
to the poor one half of the earnest thought, tireless unselfishness, and
truly Christian patience that are given to them by the great landlords
of this country. We are very sure that the English people, with their
sturdy common sense, will prefer to be in the hands of English gentlemen
rather than in the miry claws of Socialistic buccaneers.”
Just when I had reached this point I nearly ran into a man. Despite the
populousness and growth of our villages, he appeared to be the only man
for miles, but the road up which I had wandered turned and narrowed with
equal abruptness, and I nearly knocked him off the gate on which he
was leaning. I pulled up to apologize, and since he seemed ready for
society, and even pathetically pleased with it, I tossed the Daily
Wire over a hedge and fell into speech with him. He wore a wreck of
respectable clothes, and his face had that plebeian refinement which one
sees in small tailors and watchmakers, in poor men of sedentary trades.
Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt and
tattered as himself, but I do not think that the tragedy that he
symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood. There was a fixed
look in his face which told that he was one of those who in keeping body
and soul together have difficulties not only with the body, but also
with the soul.
He was a Cockney by birth, and retained the touching accent of those
streets from which I am an exile; but he had lived nearly all his life
in this countryside; and he began to tell me the affairs of it in that
formless, tail-foremost way in which the poor gossip about their great
neighbours. Names kept coming and going in the narrative like charms or
spells, unaccompanied by any biographical explanation. In particular
the name of somebody called Sir Joseph multiplied itself with the
omnipresence of a deity. I took Sir Joseph to be the principal landowner
of the district; and as the confused picture unfolded itself, I began to
form a definite and by no means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph. He was
spoken of in a strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a child might
speak of a stepmother or an unavoidable nurse; something intimate, but
by no means tender; something that was waiting for you by your own bed
and board; that told you to do this and forbade you to do that, with a
caprice that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not appear that
Sir Joseph was popular, but he was “a household word.” He was not
so much a public man as a sort of private god or omnipotence. The
particular man to whom I spoke said he had “been in trouble,” and that
Sir Joseph had been “pretty hard on him.”
And under that grey and silver cloudland, with a background of those
frost-bitten and wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me a tale
which, true or false, was as heartrending as Romeo and Juliet.
He had slowly built up in the village a small business as a
photographer, and he was engaged to a girl at one of the lodges, whom he
loved with passion. “I'm the sort that 'ad better marry,” he said;
and for all his frail figure I knew what he meant. But Sir Joseph,
and especially Sir Joseph's wife, did not want a photographer in
the village; it made the girls vain, or perhaps they disliked this
particular photographer. He worked and worked until he had just enough
to marry on honestly; and almost on the eve of his wedding the lease
expired, and Sir Joseph appeared in all his glory. He refused to
renew the lease; and the man went wildly elsewhere. But Sir Joseph was
ubiquitous; and the whole of that place was barred against him. In all
that country he could not find a shed to which to bring home his bride.
The man appealed and explained; but he was disliked as a demagogue, as
well as a photographer. Then it was as if a black cloud came across the
winter sky; for I knew what was coming. I forget even in what words
he told of Nature maddened and set free. But I still see, as in a
photograph, the grey muscles of the winter trees standing out like tight
ropes, as if all Nature were on the rack.
“She 'ad to go away,” he said.
“Wouldn't her parents,” I began, and hesitated on the word “forgive.”
“Oh, her people forgave her,” he said. “But Her Ladyship...”
“Her Ladyship made the sun and moon and stars,” I said, impatiently. “So
of course she can come between a mother and the child of her body.”
“Well, it does seem a bit 'ard...” he began with a break in his voice.
“But, good Lord, man,” I cried, “it isn't a matter of hardness! It's a
matter of impious and indecent wickedness. If your Sir Joseph knew
the passions he was playing with, he did you a wrong for which in many
Christian countries he would have a knife in him.”
The man continued to look across the frozen fields with a frown. He
certainly told his tale with real resentment, whether it was true or
false, or only exaggerated. He was certainly sullen and injured; but he
did not seem to think of any avenue of escape. At last he said:
“Well, it's a bad world; let's 'ope there's a better one.”
“Amen,” I said. “But when I think of Sir Joseph, I understand how men
have hoped there was a worse one.”
Then we were silent for a long time and felt the cold of the day
crawling up, and at last I said, abruptly:
“The other day at a Budget meeting, I heard.”
He took his elbows off the stile and seemed to change from head to foot
like a man coming out of sleep with a yawn. He said in a totally
new voice, louder but much more careless, “Ah yes, sir,... this 'ere
Budget... the Radicals are doing a lot of 'arm.”
I listened intently, and he went on. He said with a sort of careful
precision, “Settin' class against class; that's what I call it. Why,
what's made our Empire except the readiness of all classes to work
'eartily 'and-in-'and.”
He walked a little up and down the lane and stamped with the cold.
Then he said, “What I say is, what else kept us from the 'errors of the
French Revolution?”
My memory is good, and I waited in tense eagerness for the phrase that
came next. “They may laugh at Dukes; I'd like to see them 'alf as kind
and Christian and patient as lots of the landlords are. Let me tell you,
sir,” he said, facing round at me with the final air of one launching a
paradox. “The English people 'ave some common sense, and they'd rather
be in the 'ands of gentlemen than in the claws of a lot of Socialist
thieves.”
I had an indescribable sense that I ought to applaud, as if I were a
public meeting. The insane separation in the man's soul between his
experience and his ready-made theory was but a type of what covers a
quarter of England. As he turned away, I saw the Daily Wire sticking
out of his shabby pocket. He bade me farewell in quite a blaze of
catchwords, and went stumping up the road. I saw his figure grow smaller
and smaller in the great green landscape; even as the Free Man has grown
smaller and smaller in the English countryside.