of it have been lavished upon all sorts of unnecessary details, the
lizards, and the birds, and the self-conscious orchids roosting in the
trees. Some of it has even been rolled into the roads, making them white
and merry and irresponsible. The buggy horses feel the tingle of it, for
they seldom walk; although the Creator specialised in hills on Trinity
Island.
Down from some lofty market came the peasant women; their children,
their donkeys, their tawdry clothes, trappings and merchandise, soaked
with sun. Fantastic in outline, fairies of a midsummer day’s dream, the
little donkeys capered on spindle legs, bestridden by wide panniers, and
by the peasant women, riding defiantly like brigands, with bandanas
round their heads, and sun-coloured draperies.
It is curious that fashion has not yet decreed a mania for dyeing one’s
complexion mahogany, that one might wear flame-colour with impunity.
The buggy scattered the marketers. The Island horse, a plebeian creature
of humble stature, seldom meets with the luxury of feeling superior. But
the Island donkey is nothing but a door-mat on four legs, clogged red
with the hectic mud of its mother land. A cheap-jack’s pony would feel a
prince beside it.
Mr. Wise, who had been met at the station by a very small brown boy with
a very tall brown horse, had cantered away in another direction, with a
message of greeting to Albert, the sincerity of which Miss Brown had
possibly overrated.
A bungalow crouched behind a copper-coloured hedge upon the sky-line.
Two cotton trees surveyed it, one on each side. A drive of the violently
ambitious kind shot at an impossible angle up to its door-step.
“That is Park View, my home,” said Miss Brown.
“Of course, as your dog’s name is Scottie,” murmured the suffragette.
Miss Brown looked surprised. The poor suffragette’s attempts at polite
interchange of fatuities never seemed to meet with the usual fate of
such efforts. Her trivialities somehow always fell upon silence; if she
ventured on the throwing of a light bridge over a gap in the
conversation, it seemed to snap communication instead of furthering it.
She was, of course, unlucky, but she was also, it must be admitted, too
earnest in intention for petty intercourse. She tried too hard.
The buggy, commending its springs to the mercy of Providence, charged
the drive of Park View.
On the door-step, carefully posed, Albert was reading a very large book.
He started laboriously as the buggy approached, and placed the book
under his arm, taking care that the title should be visible. An
emaciated child, with manners too old, and clothes too young, for his
years.
“I have dot bissed you at all, Ah-Bargaret,” said Miss Brown’s genial
nephew. “I have been too idterested id by dew book od Chebistry. I ab
quite sorry you have cob back.”
“Chemistry,” retailed Miss Brown to the lady novelist. “A child of ten.
And—did you notice, he was so deep in his book, he got quite a start
when we arrived.”
Albert, at Park View, met with that appreciation of his poses which we
all hope to meet in heaven.
“Albert, you are to move into the back room,” said Miss Brown.
“Why?” asked Albert.
“To make room for this lady.”
“Priceless child,” said the lady novelist in brackets.
“Because she needs somewhere to rest,” said Miss Brown in a voice of
tentative reproof.
“But so do I.”
“I had better move into the back room myself, then,” sighed his aunt.
The suffragette began those hopeless protests which make the burden of
an obligation so heavy. It is so very much easier as well as more
blessed to give than to receive, that the wonder is that generosity
should retain the name of a virtue. Up to a certain point we are all
altruists, because it is too much trouble to be otherwise.
Albert, who, having gained his point, was once more comparatively
genial, prepared to bring the suffragette to his feet.
“I expect you are wudderig what is the dabe of the book I ab readig,” he
suggested to her as she stepped shakily from the buggy.
“No, I was not,” she replied gently. “I’m afraid science bores me.”
“Wha-t a lot you biss,” observed the child. “You probably spedd your
precious time id dancig, ad dressig yourself up, ad bakig berry. How
buch better——”
“Albert,” said his aunt, “this lady is tired and waiting to pass.”
“Yes, but I ab speaking to her.”
The suffragette smiled at him, and gave him her portmanteau to carry.
The earthquake at Union Town had shot the most lurid rumours into
Greyville. All the Park View servants had suddenly gone to church. The
whole village was enjoying an impromptu half-holiday. The triangular
village green, which held Greyville together and formed the pedestal of
the Court-house, echoed with news at every stage of exaggeration. One of
the mildest rumours was that Union Town had fallen into the sea. It was
said on the highest authority that the Devil had run along the streets,
throwing flames right and left. No actual news arrived, the sources of
news being wrecked, but towards evening all the Americans whose cars had
survived the ordeal suddenly invaded the hills, suffering from nerves
and a lack of luggage.
Miss Brown says she does not believe in doing a thing unless you do it
thoroughly. She says this as if it had never been said before; she
propounds it as one propounds a revolutionary theory. But unlike most
theory makers, she always translates such boasts into action. She
performed the feat of keeping a militant suffragette in bed for the rest
of that day.
The suffragette lay and imagined the gardener and the earthquake at
different stages of contact. She thought of him fighting to get out of a
falling house, and her eyes shone. She thought of him with his head
bound up, and wriggled where she lay. She thought of him unhurt, walking
with his usual gait as though he were marching to a band, and this
thought left her neutral. She never thought of him dead.
She never believed in death either as a punishment or a reward. She had
either lost the art of faith, or else she had never found it. She
pictured death as a blink of the eyes, as an altering of the facet
turned towards life, never as a miracle. She was the only person I ever
knew who honestly looked on death as unworthy of contemplation.
Of course if a friend steps round a corner, you lose sight of that
friend. But you must get used to the windings of the road. If you are a
suffragette, you have to be your own friend. You must not stretch out
your hands to find the hands of another; you must keep them clenched by
your side. On the other hand, even a suffragette is human—(I daresay you
have doubted this)—and my suffragette was only a little less human than
you or I. The fact must stand, therefore, that when she thought of the
gardener in pain, she forgot to clench her fists.
It may still be a mystery to you why the suffragette should expend
ingenuity in running away from her only friend.
If you are a rebel of thorough nature, you believe that your cause is
such a good cause that no supporter can be worthy of it. And, in the
effort to reach worth, you may possibly arrive, step by step, at the
Theory of the Hair Shirt, to which my suffragette had attained. For in
throwing her little weight on the side of the best cause she could see,
she cowed: “All my life long to discard everything superfluously
comfortable or easy. To despise peace, and to love loneliness....”
This is the texture of the Hair Shirt worn beneath the armour of a
rebel. You may call it hysteria. And perhaps you are perfectly right.
But perhaps there are even better things than being perfectly right.
The night on the Island falls as abruptly as though he who manages the
curtain had let go the string by mistake.
With the night came a trayful of supper for the suffragette, and with
the supper came Albert, not of course in the useful rôle of supper
purveyor, but only as an ornament.
“This earthquake id Udiod Towd seebs to have beed quite a catastrophe.”
“Quite,” agreed the suffragette.
“I caddot picture ad earthquake,” continued Albert. “I suppose doboddy
cad picture such ad urheard-of disaster.”
“I can,” said the suffragette. “I expect my picture is all wrong, but
it’s certainly there. I see it red and grey, which is the most vicious
discord I know.”
“Red ad grey?” repeated Albert. “Why red ad grey? What for idstadce is
red, ad what grey?”
“Why,” said the suffragette rather lamely, “I suppose the quaking is
red, and the pain grey.”
“You seeb to be talking dodsedse,” said Albert, with creditable
toleration. “I expect the flabes are red, ad the sboke grey. However, go
od with your picture.”
“I think the world would suddenly give a lurch to one side, and you
would wonder what had happened, and why you felt so sick. Before you
realised anything else you would notice a sort of dazzle of chalk-white
faces all round you.”
“The people are dearly all degroes id Udiod Towd.”
“Then you would understand, but still you wouldn’t believe that this
thing was really happening to you. You would see the houses curtsey
sideways in a leaping dust, and a house front, with its windows, all
complete, would shoot across the street with an unbearable roar, pricked
by cracking noises....”
“Why would it dot fall od you?”
“Because things don’t. And there would be a great chord of screams. And
men running a few yards this way or that, and then back again, yelping,
with lighted pipes still in their mouths....”
“What ad ugly picture. How cad you see it all so clearly?”
“I have been thinking all day—of a friend of mine, who must have seen
it. I don’t expect an earthquake is a pretty thing, although there is
something beautiful about any curious happening.”
“I doad’t agree with you,” said Albert. “There are oadly a few beautiful
thigs. Roses ... ad sudsets ... ad love....”
“Really, Albert,” protested the suffragette, “what do you know about
love?”
“Well, if it cobs to that—what do you dow about earthquakes? I cad
picture love, easily. A bad, kissing a girl, udder a cocoadut palb....”
“Nonsense,” exclaimed the suffragette, bounding so violently in her bed
as to cause a serious storm in her soup. “Kissing’s not love. Everything
that was ever said or written about kissing, I think, must have been
said or written by a man. It’s only another of their tyrannies, to
which, for the sake of love, women have had to submit.”
“You sowd like a suffragette whed you talk like that,” mocked Albert.
“No wonder,” she replied. “I am one.”
Albert looked shocked to find himself in the presence of such a
monstrosity. He went at once to warn his aunt. And she replied: “It
doesn’t matter, Albert dear, she’s only staying a few days, till she is
well enough to make other plans.”
The suffragette, left to her cooling soup, reviewed her theories and her
practice.
“What’s the good of being hard?” she asked herself, “if you are not hard
enough? Either you are harder than the world and can bruise it, or the
world is harder than you and bruises you. There is no point in just
having a hard crust. As well be dough.”
In the middle of the night there was a loud wail from Albert’s room. The
suffragette, whose room adjoined his, was the first on the spot.
“I seeb to have a bad paid,” cried Albert, who was always cautious in
his statements, “id the heart. It feels like cadcer, I thigk.”
“I don’t think so,” said the suffragette. “Perhaps you are only in
love.”
She went and knocked on Miss Brown’s door.
“But I doad’t wadt Ah-Bargaret,” said Albert, as his aunt came in. “I
should hate to die lookig at Ah-Bargaret. I ab sure I ab going to die.”
“We’ll see that you don’t,” said the suffragette, as she began to rub
his side, his poor little ribs, furrowed like a ploughed field.
“But you are an invalid yourself,” objected Miss Brown jealously. “You
had better go back to bed.”
“Doh, she is dot ad idvalid, she’s a suffragette,” whined Albert. “I
doad’t wish her to go back to bed.”
Even Albert, with his wide range of scientific ways of being
inconvenient, could scarcely have chosen a more impossible moment for an
illness. Next day it became apparent that every doctor on the Island who
had survived the disaster had plunged into the whirlpool of its after
effects. Nursing on the Island is in a rudimentary stage at all times,
but what nurses existed were not to be dragged now from Union Town.
The lady novelist said: “I know I must appear heartless, dear Margaret,
not to be helping to nurse him, but the sight of suffering gives me such
acute pain.... It’s not heartlessness, you see, it’s that my heart is
too tender.”
“I wish she would go to an hotel then,” said the harassed Miss Brown to
the suffragette. “She wants her meals so good and so regular, and I seem
to hate the sight of food just now.”
It was against the suffragette’s principles to hope anything so
desirable without translating her hope into action. It was also beyond
her powers to be diplomatic.
“I think you had better go to the hotel,” she said militantly to the
lady novelist. “You would be better fed there, and we should be more
comfortable alone.”
“In that case perhaps I had better, not being welcome in my friend’s
house,” replied the novelist. “I was going to suggest it myself, as the
sound of that priceless child’s cries wrings my heart.”
The suffragette therefore gained her point at the expense of tact,
which, as future historians will note, is a characteristic of
suffragettes.
Albert’s temperament was not that of the Spartan. He never ceased to cry
for a week. As for the pain, it was as if the god—whoever he may be—who
likes little children to suffer, sat beside him, and with a blunt shears
sliced off the top of each breath.
There is a sword, a fatal blade,
Unthwarted, subtle as the air,
And I could meet it unafraid
If I might only meet it fair.
But how I wonder why the smith
Who wrought that steel of subtle grain
Should also be contented with
So blunt and mean a thing as pain....
Albert clung to the suffragette, the straw in his sea of troubles. His
constant wail rose an octave if she ventured from the room.
The only holiday she had during that first week was half an hour on the
second evening of the ordeal, half an hour spent in carrying the lady
novelist’s majestic suit-case to the hotel.
John the coachman could not do it, as the road to the hotel was infested
with “duppies” after dark. The probability of meeting a “rolling calf”
with a human head and green eyes, or the duppy of some regrettable
ancestor, robbed even a tip of its splendour.
The carrying of the suit-case was a physical impossibility to one of the
suffragette’s lack of muscle. But to her impossibility was only an
additional “Anti” to fight, a rather worthier enemy than the rest. She
believed in the power of the thought over the deed, that was her
religion, and one is tempted to wonder whether any more complex belief
is needed. Has it ever been proved that the human will, if reverently
approached, is not omnipotent?
At any rate the suit-case, borne by a thing that looked like the
suffragette, but was in reality a super-suffragette created for the
occasion, travelled to the hotel, unmolested by duppies, but followed by
a literary lady poisoned by injured pride.
At the hotel were many Americans who said, “I guess” and “Bully” and “I
should worry,” and all the things that make a second-rate copy collector
swell with copy and feel exquisitely cosmopolitan. This collector’s
diary began to overflow to three or four foolscap sheets a day, closely
covered with dialogues on trivial subjects by very ordinary American
husbands and fathers; all Americanisms underlined and spattered with
liberal exclamation marks.
At the end of the second week of the lady novelist’s stay at the hotel
arrived a millionaire, who immediately became the gem of the collection.
He was exactly modelled on the stock millionaire to be met with in the
pages of the comic papers. He was lean, self-made, and marvellously
dressed; he wore eyeglasses and a little stitched-linen hat tilted over
them. Also the beard of a goat. At the very outset he expressed himself,
“Vurry happy to meet you, madam, always happy to meet any of our
neighbours from across the duck-pond.” It was almost too good to be
true. The novelist followed him about, so to speak, with fountain pen
poised.
His conversation was almost entirely financial. Neither the lady
novelist nor I understand such matters well enough to write them down,
but only I am wise enough not to try.
“Do you mind if I say you are a treasure?” asked the lady novelist,
after listening for an hour to a dissertation on Wall Street.
“Not at all, ma’am,” replied the millionaire politely, and drew breath
to continue his discourse. But he rewarded her by descending to the
level of her intelligence.
“Say, talking of money, I guess there’ve been more fine opportunities
lorst in Union Town this last fortnight, than ever I missed since I
commenced collecting the dollars. Would you believe me—there’s a fellow,
by name Dallas Tring, who’s inherited the only flour dee-pot in Union
Town. Uncle’s orfice crumpled in on Uncle during the quake, and left
Tring his fill of dollars right there for the picking up, so to speak.
Union Town wants flour at this crisis, and if it was mine I’d say that
Union Town, or the British Government, had darn well got to pay for it.
We don’t calc’late in hearts, this side of heaven, but in hard dollars.
Philanthropy’s a fool-game.”
“You are simply priceless,” said the lady novelist. “Please go on.”
“I’m going right on, ma’am,” said the treasure. “Would you believe me,
this Tring e-volves a system (save the mark) by which he gives away this
flour—gives it away, mind you, gratis, free, for nothing, with a kiss
thrown in if required, to any nigger cute enough to rub his little tummy
and say he’s feeling empty. You may reckon I just couldn’t quit Union
Town without a call to see if the man was an imbecile or what. I found a
young cub with a curly smile playing around in the orfice. Say, what do
you suppose he answered me when I told him ‘Good-morning, and what’s
this sentimental money-chucking, anyway?’”
“I am dying to know,” said the lady novelist.
“Said it was the foyrst time he’d ever been led to think there might be
something in sentiment after all. I was fair rattled.”
The young cub with the curly smile, as you may, with your customary
astuteness, have guessed, was the gardener. He had assumed the pose of
philanthropist, which, when conducted at some one else’s expense, is one
of the most delightful poses conceivable. The pleasure to be found in
helping the dirty destitute seems to need an explanation beyond the plea
of altruism. There is a real charm in domineering to good purpose. To
say unto one man Go and he goeth, and to another Come and he cometh, is
at all times pleasant, but when such a luxury as autocracy becomes a
virtue, there are few who disregard its glamour.
The gardener’s broken leg recovered as quickly as any leg could have
done. He had an enthusiastic and healthy attitude towards suffering and
illness, an attitude which he took instinctively, and which mental
scientists and faith-healers try to produce artificially. He was always
serenely convinced that he would be better next day. He lived in a state
of secret disappointment in to-day’s progress, and unforced confidence
in to-morrow’s. He might be described as a discontented optimist; though
often convinced that the worst had happened, he was always sure that the
best was going to happen. Conversely, of course, you can be a contented
pessimist, happy in to-day, but entirely distrustful of to-morrow.
To the gardener’s methods may perhaps be ascribed the fact that in a
fortnight he was able with the help of a stick, and with the
encouragement of Aitch and Zed, to walk about his room. His first
excursion was to the window.
The houses opposite had fallen in on their own foundations. One complete
wall was standing starkly amid the mass. Portraits of the King and Queen
and a text or two still clung to their positions against the stained and
florid wall-paper.
“Do you see that house that you just can’t see, the other side of that
wall?” asked Aitch.
“Yes, I see,” said the gardener. “I mean I just can’t see.”
“That’s where dead Uncle Jonathan lives,” said Aitch. “He’s left Father
the flour in his will.”
“How good of him. I hope it was a pretty one.”
“Father said, ‘There’s a fortune there.’ And Mother said, ‘Oh, Dally,
it’s as if it was left in trust for poor Union Town.’”
When the gardener next met Mr. Tring, he discovered how entirely
sufficient for two are the opinions of one.
“Of course I’m awfully lucky, in a way,” said Mr. Tring. “It’s a big
inheritance, and hardly damaged at all by the earthquake. But at
present, of course, it’s all responsibility and no returns. I feel as if
it’s sort of left me in trust for Union Town.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Courtesy—surely the least witty
comment ever invented.
“I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mrs. Rust, who now made this
remark mechanically in any pause in the conversation.
“You consider that Mr. Tring should pile up a big bill against the
British Government?” suggested the gardener.
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “I consider the niggers can
eat—mangoes.”
“I sometimes wonder,” said the gardener, “whether one has a duty to
oneself. One feels as if one has, but I always—in theory—distrust a duty
that pays.”
“Certainly one has a duty to oneself,” said Courtesy. “Duty begins at
home. That’s in the Bible, isn’t it?”
“Most of the texts tell you your only duty is to the man next door,”
said Mr. Tring, blushing.
“I entirely disagree with you,” said Mrs. Rust.
Soon after this discussion Mr. Tring, inspired by his wife, produced a
plan for the benefit of the gardener.
“When this business is over we shall—I mean I shall be a rich man and a
busy man. I need somebody young around. I’d like fine to buy your youth
(his wife’s words). What about being my secretary for the present? It
might give you a start in Island business.”
“This is not a time for paid work,” said the gardener, “with half the
money on the Island gone to dust.”
“I take your meaning,” said Mr. Tring. “But in my opinion the time’s all
right. Good work’s good work, whether it’s honorary or not. I never
liked the idea that there’s something heroic in refusing money, making
out that there’s something mean in accepting it. If you help you help,
and the help’s none the worse if it makes you self-supporting.”
The word “self-supporting” was a sharp and accusing word to the
gardener. Most of us privately possess certain words that search out the
tender parts in our spiritual anatomy. The words “absolute
impossibility,” for instance, angered the suffragette to militant
protest; the mention of “narrow-mindedness” ruffled the priest’s
sensibilities; as for me, the expression “physical disability” hurts me
like a knife. It may or may not be out of place to add that the effect
on Courtesy—that practical girl—of an allusion to “banana fritters” was
to make her feel sick. You may know people better by their weaknesses
than by their strength.
The word self-supporting, therefore, goaded the gardener into accepting
Mr. Tring’s offer.
His stock of poses, though very wide in range, had not as yet extended
as far as practical business, in black and white, hours ten to five
daily. He had—I report it with disgust—a contempt for the pen as a
business implement. He was himself an artist without expression, a poet
caged; a musician in desire, he suffered from a mute worship of all art.
And he believed that the pen was as sacred an instrument as the violin,
or the palette. To make money by the pen in business was equal to
fiddling on a kerb-stone, or designing picture post cards. These
theories are pose-theories, of course, and untenable by the practical
man. But some of the gardener’s poses had crystallised into belief. He
was, as you may have noticed, anything but a practical man.
“Perhaps,” said Mr. Tring, “you might be what my wife calls an
‘out-of-doors secretary.’ I have been officially asked to organise the
distributing of the flour. Enquiries will have to be made. The niggers
are awfully sly, you know; you’d have thought they’d be too silly to be
sly.”
“I have noticed that the silly seem to be protected by Providence.
Slyness seems to be given as a sort of compensation. Otherwise, of
course, we should stamp out the silly, and a lot of valuable human
curiosities would become extinct.”