Mr. Vernon-Smith, of Trinity, and the Social Settlement, Tooting,
author of “A Higher London” and “The Boyg System at Work,” came to the
conclusion, after looking through his select and even severe library,
that Dickens's “Christmas Carol” was a very suitable thing to be read to
charwomen. Had they been men they would have been forcibly subjected
to Browning's “Christmas Eve” with exposition, but chivalry spared
the charwomen, and Dickens was funny, and could do no harm. His fellow
worker Wimpole would read things like “Three Men in a Boat” to the poor;
but Vernon-Smith regarded this as a sacrifice of principle, or (what was
the same thing to him) of dignity. He would not encourage them in their
vulgarity; they should have nothing from him that was not literature.
Still Dickens was literature after all; not literature of a high order,
of course, not thoughtful or purposeful literature, but literature quite
fitted for charwomen on Christmas Eve.
He did not, however, let them absorb Dickens without due antidotes of
warning and criticism. He explained that Dickens was not a writer of the
first rank, since he lacked the high seriousness of Matthew Arnold.
He also feared that they would find the characters of Dickens terribly
exaggerated. But they did not, possibly because they were meeting them
every day. For among the poor there are still exaggerated characters;
they do not go to the Universities to be universified. He told the
charwomen, with progressive brightness, that a mad wicked old miser
like Scrooge would be really quite impossible now; but as each of the
charwomen had an uncle or a grandfather or a father-in-law who was
exactly like Scrooge, his cheerfulness was not shared. Indeed, the
lecture as a whole lacked something of his firm and elastic touch, and
towards the end he found himself rambling, and in a sort of abstraction,
talking to them as if they were his fellows. He caught himself saying
quite mystically that a spiritual plane (by which he meant his plane)
always looked to those on the sensual or Dickens plane, not merely
austere, but desolate. He said, quoting Bernard Shaw, that we could all
go to heaven just as we can all go to a classical concert, but if we
did it would bore us. Realizing that he was taking his flock far out of
their depth, he ended somewhat hurriedly, and was soon receiving that
generous applause which is a part of the profound ceremonialism of the
working classes. As he made his way to the door three people stopped
him, and he answered them heartily enough, but with an air of hurry
which he would not have dreamed of showing to people of his own class.
One was a little schoolmistress who told him with a sort of feverish
meekness that she was troubled because an Ethical Lecturer had said that
Dickens was not really Progressive; but she thought he was Progressive;
and surely he was Progressive. Of what being Progressive was she had
no more notion than a whale. The second person implored him for a
subscription to some soup kitchen or cheap meal; and his refined
features sharpened; for this, like literature, was a matter of principle
with him. “Quite the wrong method,” he said, shaking his head and
pushing past. “Nothing any good but the Boyg system.” The third
stranger, who was male, caught him on the step as he came out into the
snow and starlight; and asked him point blank for money. It was a
part of Vernon-Smith's principles that all such persons are prosperous
impostors; and like a true mystic he held to his principles in defiance
of his five senses, which told him that the night was freezing and the
man very thin and weak. “If you come to the Settlement between four and
five on Friday week,” he said, “inquiries will be made.” The man stepped
back into the snow with a not ungraceful gesture as of apology; he had
frosty silver hair, and his lean face, though in shadow, seemed to wear
something like a smile. As Vernon-Smith stepped briskly into the street,
the man stooped down as if to do up his bootlace. He was, however,
guiltless of any such dandyism; and as the young philanthropist stood
pulling on his gloves with some particularity, a heavy snowball was
suddenly smashed into his face. He was blind for a black instant; then
as some of the snow fell, saw faintly, as in a dim mirror of ice or
dreamy crystal, the lean man bowing with the elegance of a dancing
master, and saying amiably, “A Christmas box.” When he had quite cleared
his face of snow the man had vanished.
For three burning minutes Cyril Vernon-Smith was nearer to the people
and more their brother than he had been in his whole high-stepping
pedantic existence; for if he did not love a poor man, he hated one. And
you never really regard a labourer as your equal until you can quarrel
with him. “Dirty cad!” he muttered. “Filthy fool! Mucking with snow like
a beastly baby! When will they be civilized? Why, the very state of the
street is a disgrace and a temptation to such tomfools. Why isn't all
this snow cleared away and the street made decent?”
To the eye of efficiency, there was, indeed, something to complain of
in the condition of the road. Snow was banked up on both sides in white
walls and towards the other and darker end of the street even rose into
a chaos of low colourless hills. By the time he reached them he was
nearly knee deep, and was in a far from philanthropic frame of mind.
The solitude of the little streets was as strange as their white
obstruction, and before he had ploughed his way much further he was
convinced that he had taken a wrong turning, and fallen upon some
formless suburb unvisited before. There was no light in any of the low,
dark houses; no light in anything but the blank emphatic snow. He was
modern and morbid; hellish isolation hit and held him suddenly; anything
human would have relieved the strain, if it had been only the leap of a
garotter. Then the tender human touch came indeed; for another snowball
struck him, and made a star on his back. He turned with fierce joy, and
ran after a boy escaping; ran with dizzy and violent speed, he knew not
for how long. He wanted the boy; he did not know whether he loved or
hated him. He wanted humanity; he did not know whether he loved or hated
it.
As he ran he realized that the landscape around him was changing in
shape though not in colour. The houses seemed to dwindle and disappear
in hills of snow as if buried; the snow seemed to rise in tattered
outlines of crag and cliff and crest, but he thought nothing of all
these impossibilities until the boy turned to bay. When he did he saw
the child was queerly beautiful, with gold red hair, and a face as
serious as complete happiness. And when he spoke to the boy his own
question surprised him, for he said for the first time in his life,
“What am I doing here?” And the little boy, with very grave eyes,
answered, “I suppose you are dead.”
He had (also for the first time) a doubt of his spiritual destiny. He
looked round on a towering landscape of frozen peaks and plains, and
said, “Is this hell?” And as the child stared, but did not answer, he
knew it was heaven.
All over that colossal country, white as the world round the Pole,
little boys were playing, rolling each other down dreadful slopes,
crushing each other under falling cliffs; for heaven is a place where
one can fight for ever without hurting. Smith suddenly remembered how
happy he had been as a child, rolling about on the safe sandhills around
Conway.
Right above Smith's head, higher than the cross of St. Paul's, but
curving over him like the hanging blossom of a harebell, was a cavernous
crag of snow. A hundred feet below him, like a landscape seen from a
balloon, lay snowy flats as white and as far away. He saw a little
boy stagger, with many catastrophic slides, to that toppling peak; and
seizing another little boy by the leg, send him flying away down to the
distant silver plains. There he sank and vanished in the snow as if in
the sea; but coming up again like a diver rushed madly up the steep once
more, rolling before him a great gathering snowball, gigantic at last,
which he hurled back at the mountain crest, and brought both the boy and
the mountain down in one avalanche to the level of the vale. The other
boy also sank like a stone, and also rose again like a bird, but Smith
had no leisure to concern himself with this. For the collapse of that
celestial crest had left him standing solitary in the sky on a peak like
a church spire.
He could see the tiny figures of the boys in the valley below, and he
knew by their attitudes that they were eagerly telling him to jump. Then
for the first time he knew the nature of faith, as he had just known
the fierce nature of charity. Or rather for the second time, for he
remembered one moment when he had known faith before. It was n when his
father had taught him to swim, and he had believed he could float on
water not only against reason, but (what is so much harder) against
instinct. Then he had trusted water; now he must trust air.
He jumped. He went through air and then through snow with the same
blinding swiftness. But as he buried himself in solid snow like a bullet
he seemed to learn a million things and to learn them all too fast.
He knew that the whole world is a snowball, and that all the stars are
snowballs. He knew that no man will be fit for heaven till he loves
solid whiteness as a little boy loves a ball of snow.
He sank and sank and sank... and then, as usually happens in such cases,
woke up, with a start--in the street. True, he was taken up for a common
drunk, but (if you properly appreciate his conversion) you will realize
that he did not mind; since the crime of drunkenness is infinitely less
than that of spiritual pride, of which he had really been guilty.