M’KAY
IT was foggy and overcast as we walked home to Goodge Street. The
churches and chapels were emptying themselves, but the great mass of the
population had been “nowhere.” I had dinner with M’Kay, and as the day
wore on the fog thickened. London on a dark Sunday afternoon, more
especially about Goodge Street, is depressing. The inhabitants drag
themselves hither and thither in languor and uncertainty. Small mobs
loiter at the doors of the gin palaces. Costermongers wander aimlessly,
calling “walnuts” with a cry so melancholy that it sounds as the wail of
the hopelessly lost may be imagined to sound when their anguish has been
deadened by the monotony of a million years.
About two or three o’clock decent working men in their best clothes
emerge from the houses in such streets as Nassau Street. It is part of
their duty to go out after dinner on Sunday with the wife and children.
The husband pushes the perambulator out of the dingy passage, and gazes
doubtfully this way and that way, not knowing whither to go, and
evidently longing for the Monday, when his work, however disagreeable it
may be, will be his plain duty. The wife follows carrying a child, and a
boy and girl in unaccustomed apparel walk by her side. They come out
into Mortimer Street. There are no shops open; the sky over their heads
is mud, the earth is mud under their feet, the muddy houses stretch in
long rows, black, gaunt, uniform. The little party reach Hyde Park, also
wrapped in impenetrable mud-grey. The man’s face brightens for a moment
as he says, “It is time to go back,” and so they return, without the
interchange of a word, unless perhaps they happen to see an omnibus horse
fall down on the greasy stones. What is there worth thought or speech on
such an expedition? Nothing! The tradesman who kept the oil and colour
establishment opposite to us was not to be tempted outside. It was a
little more comfortable than Nassau Street, and, moreover, he was
religious and did not encourage Sabbath-breaking. He and his family
always moved after their mid-day Sabbath repast from the little back room
behind the shop up to what they called the drawing-room overhead. It was
impossible to avoid seeing them every time we went to the window. The
father of the family, after his heavy meal, invariably sat in the
easy-chair with a handkerchief over his eyes and slept. The children
were always at the windows, pretending to read books, but in reality
watching the people below. At about four o’clock their papa generally
awoke, and demanded a succession of hymn tunes played on the piano. When
the weather permitted, the lower sash was opened a little, and the
neighbours were indulged with the performance of “Vital Spark,” the
father “coming in” now and then with a bass note or two at the end where
he was tolerably certain of the harmony. At five o’clock a prophecy of
the incoming tea brought us some relief from the contemplation of the
landscape or brick-scape. I say “some relief,” for meals at M’Kay’s were
a little disagreeable. His wife was an honest, good little woman, but so
much attached to him and so dependent on him that she was his mere echo.
She had no opinions which were not his, and whenever he said anything
which went beyond the ordinary affairs of the house, she listened with
curious effort, and generally responded by a weakened repetition of
M’Kay’s own observations. He perpetually, therefore, had before him an
enfeebled reflection of himself, and this much irritated him,
notwithstanding his love for her; for who could help loving a woman who,
without the least hesitation, would have opened her veins at his command,
and have given up every drop of blood in her body for him? Over and over
again I have heard him offer some criticism on a person or event, and the
customary chime of approval would ensue, provoking him to such a degree
that he would instantly contradict himself with much bitterness, leaving
poor Mrs. M’Kay in much perplexity. Such a shot as this generally
reduced her to timid silence. As a rule, he always discouraged any topic
at his house which was likely to serve as an occasion for showing his
wife’s dependence on him. He designedly talked about her household
affairs, asked her whether she had mended his clothes and ordered the
coals. She knew that these things were not what was upon his mind, and
she answered him in despairing tones, which showed how much she felt the
obtrusive condescension to her level. I greatly pitied her, and
sometimes, in fact, my emotion at the sight of her struggles with her
limitations almost overcame me and I was obliged to get up and go. She
was childishly affectionate. If M’Kay came in and happened to go up to
her and kiss her, her face brightened into the sweetest and happiest
smile. I recollect once after he had been unusually annoyed with her he
repented just as he was leaving home, and put his lips to her head,
holding it in both his hands. I saw her gently take the hand from her
forehead and press it to her mouth, the tears falling down her cheek
meanwhile. Nothing would ever tempt her to admit anything against her
husband. M’Kay was violent and unjust at times. His occupation he
hated, and his restless repugnance to it frequently discharged itself
indifferently upon everything which came in his way. His children often
thought him almost barbarous, but in truth he did not actually see them
when he was in one of these moods. What was really present with him,
excluding everything else, was the sting of something more than usually
repulsive of which they knew nothing. Mrs. M’Kay’s answer to her
children’s remonstrances when they were alone with her always was, “He is
so worried,” and she invariably dwelt upon their faults which had given
him the opportunity for his wrath.
I think M’Kay’s treatment of her wholly wrong. I think that he ought not
to have imposed himself upon her so imperiously. I think he ought to
have striven to ascertain what lay concealed in that modest heart, to
have encouraged its expression and development, to have debased himself
before her that she might receive courage to rise, and he would have
found that she had something which he had not; not _his_ something
perhaps, but something which would have made his life happier. As it
was, he stood upon his own ground above her. If she could reach him,
well and good, if not, the helping hand was not proffered, and she fell
back, hopeless. Later on he discovered his mistake. She became ill very
gradually, and M’Kay began to see in the distance a prospect of losing
her. A frightful pit came in view. He became aware that he could not do
without her. He imagined what his home would have been with other women
whom he knew, and he confessed that with them he would have been less
contented. He acknowledged that he had been guilty of a kind of criminal
epicurism; that he rejected in foolish, fatal, nay, even wicked
indifference, the bread of life upon which he might have lived and
thriven. His whole effort now was to suppress himself in his wife. He
read to her, a thing he never did before, and when she misunderstood, he
patiently explained; he took her into his counsels and asked her opinion;
he abandoned his own opinion for hers, and in the presence of her
children he always deferred to her, and delighted to acknowledge that she
knew more than he did, that she was right and he was wrong. She was now
confined to her house, and the end was near, but this was the most
blessed time of her married life. She grew under the soft rain of his
loving care, and opened out, not, indeed, into an oriental flower, rich
in profound mystery of scent and colour, but into a blossom of the
chalk-down. Altogether concealed and closed she would have remained if
it had not been for this beneficent and heavenly gift poured upon her.
He had just time enough to see what she really was, and then she died.
There are some natures that cannot unfold under pressure or in the
presence of unregarding power. Hers was one. They require a clear space
round them, the removal of everything which may overmaster them, and
constant delicate attention. They require too a recognition of the fact,
which M’Kay for a long time did not recognise, that it is folly to force
them and to demand of them that they shall be what they cannot be. I
stood by the grave this morning of my poor, pale, clinging little friend
now for some years at peace, and I thought that the tragedy of Promethean
torture or Christ-like crucifixion may indeed be tremendous, but there is
a tragedy too in the existence of a soul like hers, conscious of its
feebleness and ever striving to overpass it, ever aware that it is an
obstacle to the return of the affection of the man whom she loves.
Meals, as I have said, were disagreeable at M’Kay’s, and when we wanted
to talk we went out of doors. The evening after our visit to the
debating hall we moved towards Portland Place, and walked up and down
there for an hour or more. M’Kay had a passionate desire to reform the
world. The spectacle of the misery of London, and of the distracted
swaying hither and thither of the multitudes who inhabit it, tormented
him incessantly. He always chafed at it, and he never seemed sure that
he had a right to the enjoyment of the simplest pleasures so long as
London was before him. What a farce, he would cry, is all this poetry,
philosophy, art, and culture, when millions of wretched mortals are
doomed to the eternal darkness and crime of the city! Here are the
educated classes occupying themselves with exquisite emotions, with
speculations upon the Infinite, with addresses to flowers, with the
worship of waterfalls and flying clouds, and with the incessant
portraiture of a thousand moods and variations of love, while their
neighbours lie grovelling in the mire, and never know anything more of
life or its duties than is afforded them by a police report in a bit of
newspaper picked out of the kennel. We went one evening to hear a great
violin-player, who played such music, and so exquisitely, that the limits
of life were removed. But we had to walk up the Haymarket home, between
eleven and twelve o’clock, and the violin-playing became the merest
trifling. M’Kay had been brought up upon the Bible. He had before him,
not only there, but in the history of all great religious movements, a
record of the improvement of the human race, or of large portions of it,
not merely by gradual civilisation, but by inspiration spreading itself
suddenly. He could not get it out of his head that something of this
kind is possible again in our time. He longed to try for himself in his
own poor way in one of the slums about Drury Lane. I sympathised with
him, but I asked him what he had to say. I remember telling him that I
had been into St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that I pictured to myself the
cathedral full, and myself in the pulpit. I was excited while imagining
the opportunity offered me of delivering some message to three or four
thousand persons in such a building, but in a minute or two I discovered
that my sermon would be very nearly as follows: “Dear friends, I know no
more than you know; we had better go home.” I admitted to him that if he
could believe in hell-fire, or if he could proclaim the Second Advent, as
Paul did to the Thessalonians, and get people to believe, he might change
their manners, but otherwise he could do nothing but resort to a much
slower process. With the departure of a belief in the supernatural
departs once and for ever the chance of regenerating the race except by
the school and by science. {31} However, M’Kay thought he would try.
His earnestness was rather a hindrance than a help to him, for it
prevented his putting certain important questions to himself, or at any
rate it prevented his waiting for distinct answers. He recurred to the
apostles and Bunyan, and was convinced that it was possible even now to
touch depraved men and women with an idea which should recast their
lives. So it is that the main obstacle to our success is a success which
has preceded us. We instinctively follow the antecedent form, and
consequently we either pass by, or deny altogether, the life of our own
time, because its expression has changed. We never do practically
believe that the Messiah is not incarnated twice in the same flesh. He
came as Jesus, and we look for Him as Jesus now, overlooking the
manifestation of to-day, and dying, perhaps, without recognising it.
M’Kay had found a room near Parker Street, Drury Lane, in which he
proposed to begin, and that night, as we trod the pavement of Portland
Place, he propounded his plans to me, I listening without much
confidence, but loth nevertheless to take the office of Time upon myself,
and to disprove what experience would disprove more effectually. His
object was nothing less than gradually to attract Drury Lane to come and
be saved.
The first Sunday I went with him to the room. As we walked over the
Drury Lane gratings of the cellars a most foul stench came up, and one in
particular I remember to this day. A man half dressed pushed open a
broken window beneath us, just as we passed by, and there issued such a
blast of corruption, made up of gases bred by filth, air breathed and
rebreathed a hundred times, charged with odours of unnameable personal
uncleanness and disease, that I staggered to the gutter with a qualm
which I could scarcely conquer. At the doors of the houses stood grimy
women with their arms folded and their hair disordered. Grimier boys and
girls had tied a rope to broken railings, and were swinging on it. The
common door to a score of lodgings stood ever open, and the children
swarmed up and down the stairs carrying with them patches of mud every
time they came in from the street. The wholesome practice which amongst
the decent poor marks off at least one day in the week as a day on which
there is to be a change; when there is to be some attempt to procure
order and cleanliness; a day to be preceded by soap and water, by
shaving, and by as many clean clothes as can be procured, was unknown
here. There was no break in the uniformity of squalor; nor was it even
possible for any single family to emerge amidst such altogether
suppressive surroundings. All self-respect, all effort to do anything
more than to satisfy somehow the grossest wants, had departed. The shops
were open; most of them exhibiting a most miscellaneous collection of
goods, such as bacon cut in slices, fire-wood, a few loaves of bread, and
sweetmeats in dirty bottles. Fowls, strange to say, black as the
flagstones, walked in and out of these shops, or descended into the dark
areas. The undertaker had not put up his shutters. He had drawn down a
yellow blind, on which was painted a picture of a suburban cemetery. Two
funerals, the loftiest effort of his craft, were depicted approaching the
gates. When the gas was alight behind the blind, an effect was produced
which was doubtless much admired. He also displayed in his window a
model coffin, a work of art. It was about a foot long, varnished,
studded with little brass nails, and on the lid was fastened a rustic
cross stretching from end to end. The desire to decorate existence in
some way or other with more or less care is nearly universal. The most
sensual and the meanest almost always manifest an indisposition to be
content with mere material satisfaction. I have known selfish,
gluttonous, drunken men spend their leisure moments in trimming a bed of
scarlet geraniums, and the vulgarest and most commonplace of mortals
considers it a necessity to put a picture in the room or an ornament on
the mantelpiece. The instinct, even in its lowest forms, is divine. It
is the commentary on the text that man shall not live by bread alone. It
is evidence of an acknowledged compulsion—of which art is the highest
manifestation—to _escape_. In the alleys behind Drury Lane this
instinct, the very salt of life, was dead, crushed out utterly, a symptom
which seemed to me ominous, and even awful to the last degree. The only
house in which it survived was in that of the undertaker, who displayed
the willows, the black horses, and the coffin. These may have been
nothing more than an advertisement, but from the care with which the
cross was elaborated, and the neatness with which it was made to resemble
a natural piece of wood, I am inclined to believe that the man felt some
pleasure in his work for its own sake, and that he was not utterly
submerged. The cross in such dens as these, or, worse than dens, in such
sewers! If it be anything, it is a symbol of victory, of power to
triumph over resistance, and even death. Here was nothing but sullen
subjugation, the most grovelling slavery, mitigated only by a tendency to
mutiny. Here was a strength of circumstance to quell and dominate which
neither Jesus nor Paul could have overcome—worse a thousandfold than
Scribes or Pharisees, or any form of persecution. The preaching of Jesus
would have been powerless here; in fact, no known stimulus, nothing ever
held up before men to stir the soul to activity, can do anything in the
back streets of great cities so long as they are the cesspools which they
are now.
We came to the room. About a score of M’Kay’s own friends were there,
and perhaps half-a-dozen outsiders, attracted by the notice which had
been pasted on a board at the entrance. M’Kay announced his errand. The
ignorance and misery of London he said were intolerable to him. He could
not take any pleasure in life when he thought upon them. What could he
do? that was the question. He was not a man of wealth. He could not buy
up these hovels. He could not force an entrance into them and persuade
their inhabitants to improve themselves. He had no talents wherewith to
found a great organisation or create public opinion. He had determined,
after much thought, to do what he was now doing. It was very little, but
it was all he could undertake. He proposed to keep this room open as a
place to which those who wished might resort at different times, and find
some quietude, instruction, and what fortifying thoughts he could collect
to enable men to endure their almost unendurable sufferings. He did not
intend to teach theology. Anything which would be serviceable he would
set forth, but in the main he intended to rely on holding up the examples
of those who were greater than ourselves and were our redeemers. He
meant to teach Christ in the proper sense of the word. Christ now is
admired probably more than He had ever been. Everybody agrees to admire
Him, but where are the people who really do what He did? There is no
religion now-a-days. Religion is a mere literature. Cultivated persons
sit in their studies and write overflowingly about Jesus, or meet at
parties and talk about Him; but He is not of much use to me unless I say
to myself, _how is it with thee_? unless I myself become what He was.
This was the meaning of Jesus to the Apostle Paul. Jesus was in him; he
had put on Jesus; that is to say, Jesus lived in him like a second soul,
taking the place of his own soul and directing him accordingly. That was
religion, and it is absurd to say that the English nation at this moment,
or any section of it, is religious. Its educated classes are inhabited
by a hundred minds. We are in a state of anarchy, each of us with a
different aim and shaping himself according to a different type; while
the uneducated classes are entirely given over to the “natural man.” He
was firmly persuaded that we need religion, poor and rich alike. We need
some controlling influence to bind together our scattered energies. We
do not know what we are doing. We read one book one day and another book
another day, but it is idle wandering to right and left; it is not
advancing on a straight road. It is not possible to bind ourselves down
to a certain defined course, but still it is an enormous, an incalculable
advantage for us to have some irreversible standard set up in us by which
everything we meet is to be judged. That is the meaning of the
prophecy—whether it will ever be fulfilled God only knows—that Christ
shall judge the world. All religions have been this. They have said
that in the midst of the infinitely possible—infinitely possible evil and
infinitely possible good too—we become distracted. A thousand forces
good and bad act upon us. It is necessary, if we are to be men, if we
are to be saved, that we should be rescued from this tumult, and that our
feet should be planted upon a path. His object, therefore, would be to
preach Christ, as before said, and to introduce into human life His
unifying influence. He would try and get them to see things with the
eyes of Christ, to love with His love, to judge with His judgment. He
believed Christ was fitted to occupy this place. He deliberately chose
Christ as worthy to be our central, shaping force. He would try by
degrees to prove this; to prove that Christ’s way of dealing with life is
the best way, and so to create a genuinely Christian spirit, which, when
any choice of conduct is presented to us, will prompt us to ask first of
all, _how would Christ have it_? or, when men and things pass before us,
will decide through him what we have to say about them. M’Kay added that
he hoped his efforts would not be confined to talking. He trusted to be
able, by means of this little meeting, gradually to gain admittance for
himself and his friends into the houses of the poor and do some practical
good. At present he had no organisation and no plans. He did not
believe in organisation and plans preceding a clear conception of what
was to be accomplished. Such, as nearly as I can now recollect, is an
outline of his discourse. It was thoroughly characteristic of him. He
always talked in this fashion. He was for ever insisting on the
aimlessness of modern life, on the powerlessness of its vague activities
to mould men into anything good, to restrain them from evil or moderate
their passions, and he was possessed by a vision of a new Christianity
which was to take the place of the old and dead theologies. I have
reported him in my own language. He strove as much as he could to make
his meaning plain to everybody. Just before he finished, three or four
out of the half-a-dozen outsiders who were present whistled with all
their might and ran down the stairs shouting to one another. As we went
out they had collected about the door, and amused themselves by pushing
one another against us, and kicking an old kettle behind us and amongst
us all the way up the street, so that we were covered with splashes.
Mrs. M’Kay went with us, and when we reached home, she tried to say
something about what she had heard. The cloud came over her husband’s
face at once; he remained silent for a minute, and getting up and going
to the window, observed that it ought to be cleaned, and that he could
hardly see the opposite house. The poor woman looked distressed, and I
was just about to come to her rescue by continuing what she had been
saying, when she rose, not in anger, but in trouble, and went upstairs.