coming of age. There were half the highest people in England there; and
a little while before the tenantry went to their banquet in the
marquees, the boy-peer and his guests were all out on the terraces and
the lawns. With him was a very noble deer-hound, whom he had owned for
four years.
Suddenly the hound, Red Comyn, left his titled master, and plunged
head-foremost through the patrician crowd, and threw himself in wild
raptures on to a poor, miserable, tattered, travelling cobbler, who had
dared to creep in through the open gates and the happy crowds, hoping
for a broken crust. Red Comyn pounced on him, and caressed him, and laid
massive paws upon his shoulders, and gave him maddest welcome--this poor
hungry man, in the midst of that aristocratic festival.
The cobbler could scarcely speak awhile; but when he got his breath, his
arms were round the hound, and his eyes were wet with tears.
"Please pardon him, my lord," he said, all in a quiver and a tremble.
"He was mine once from the time he was pupped for a whole two year; and
he loved me, poor soul, and he ha'n't forgot. He don't know no better,
my lord--he's only a dog."
No; he didn't know any better than to remember, and be faithful, and to
recognise a friend, no matter in what woe or want. Ah, indeed, dogs are
far behind you!
For the credit of "the order," it may be added that Red Comyn and the
cobbler have parted no more, but dwell together still upon that young
lord's lands.
* * *
Appearances are so and so, hence facts must be so and so likewise, is
Society's formula. This sounds mathematical and accurate; but as facts,
nine times out of ten, belie appearances, the logic is very false. There
is something, indeed, comically stupid in your satisfied belief in the
surface of any parliamentary or public facts that may be presented to
you, varnished out of all likeness to the truth by the suave periods of
writer or speaker. But there is something tragically stupid about your
dogged acceptation of any social construction of a private life, damned
out of all possibility of redemption by the flippant deductions of
chatter-box or of slanderer.
Now and then you poor humanities, who are always so dimly conscious that
you are all lies to one another, get a glimpse of various truths from
some cynical dead man's diary, or some statesman's secret papers. But
you never are warned: you placidly continue greedily to gobble up,
unexamined, the falsehoods of public men; and impudently to adjudicate
on the unrevealed secrets of private lives.
* * *
You are given, very continually, to denouncing or lamenting the gradual
encroachment of mob-rule. But, alas! whose fault, pray, is it that
bill-discounters dwell as lords in ancient castles; that money-lenders
reign over old, time-honoured lands; that low-born hirelings dare to
address their master with a grin and sneer, strong in the knowledge of
his shameful secrets; and that the vile daughters of the populace are
throned in public places, made gorgeous with the jewels which, from the
heirlooms of a great patriciate, have fallen to be the gew-gaws of a
fashionable infamy?
Ah, believe me, an aristocracy is a feudal fortress which, though it has
merciless beleaguers in the Jacquerie of plebeian Envy, has yet no foe
so deadly as its own internal traitor of Lost Dignity!
* * *
"But ye dunna get good wage?" said the miner, with practical wisdom.
"We doan't," confessed the East Anglian, "we doan't. And that theer
botherin' machinery as do the threshin', and the reapin', and the
sawin', and the mowin', hev a ruined us. See!--in old time, when ground
was frost-bit or water-soaked, the min threshed in-doors, in barns, and
kep in work so. But now the machine, he dew all theer is to dew, and dew
it up so quick. Theer's a many more min than theer be things to dew. In
winter-time measter he doan't want half o' us; and we're just out o'
labour; and we fall sick, cos o' naethin' to eat; and goes tew
parish--able-bodied min strong as steers."
"Machine's o' use i' mill-work," suggested one of the northerners.
"O' use! ay, o' coorse 'tis o' use--tew tha measters," growled the East
Anglian. "But if ye warn't needed at yer mill cos the iron beast was a
weavin' and a reelin' and a dewin' of it all, how'd yer feel? Wi' six
children, mebbe, biggest ony seven or eight, a crazin' ye for bread. And
ye mayn't send 'em out, cos o' labour-laws, to pick up a halfpenny for
theerselves; and tha passon be all agin yer, cos ye warn't thrifty and
didn't gev a penny for the forrin blacks out o' the six shillin' a week?
Would yer think iron beast wor o' use thin? or would yer damn him hard?"
* * *
The poetic faculty--as you call the insight and the sympathy which feels
a divinity in all created things and a joy unutterable in the natural
beauty of the earth--is lacking in the generality of women,
notwithstanding their claims to the monopoly of emotion. If it be not,
how comes it that women have given you no great poet since the days of
Sappho?
It is women's deficiency in intellect, you will observe. Not a whit: it
is women's deficiency in sympathy.
The greatness of a poet lies in the universality of his sympathies. And
women are not sympathetic, because they are intensely self-centred.
* * *
All living things seemed to draw closer together in the perils and
privations of the winter, as you men do in the frost of your frights or
your sorrows. In summer--as in prosperity--every one is for himself, and
is heedless of others because he needs nothing of them.
* * *
It was covered, from the lowest of its stones to the top of its peaked
roof, with a gigantic rose-thorn.
"Sure the noblest shrub as ever God have made," would Ben say, looking
at its massive, cactus-like branches, with their red, waxen,
tender-coloured berries. The cottage was very old, and the rose-thorn
was the growth of centuries. Men's hands had never touched it. It had
stretched where it would, ungoverned, unhampered, unarrested. It had a
beautiful dusky glow about it always, from its peculiar thickness and
its blended hues; and in the chilly weather the little robin red-breasts
would come and flutter into it, and screen themselves in its shelter
from the cold, and make it rosier yet with the brightness of their
little ruddy throats.
"Tha Christ-birds do allus seem safest like i' tha Christ-bush," Ben
would say softly, breaking off the larger half of his portion of oaten
cake, to crumble for the robins with the dawn. I never knew what he
meant, though I saw he had some soft, grave, old-world story in his
thoughts, that made the rose-thorn and the red-breasts both sacred to
him.
* * *
"Ah, my dear, you little dream the ecstatic delight that exists in
Waste, for the vulgarity of a mind that has never enjoyed Possession,
till it comes to riot at one blow in Spoliation!"
"I do wish you would answer me plainly," I said, sulkily,
"without--without----"
"Epigrams!" she added, sharply; "I daresay you do, my dear. Epigrams are
the salts of life; but they wither up the grasses of foolishness, and
naturally the grasses hate to be sprinkled therewith."
* * *
We are ill appreciated, we cynics; on my honour if cynicism be not the
highest homage to Virtue there is, I should like to know what Virtue
wants. We sigh over her absence, and we glorify her perfections. But
Virtue is always a trifle stuck-up, you know, and she is very difficult
to please.
She is always looking uneasily out of the "tail of her eye" at her
opposition-leader Sin, and wondering why Sin dresses so well, and drinks
such very good wine. We "cynics" tell her that under Sin's fine clothes
there is a breast cancer-eaten, and at the bottom of the wine there is a
bitter dreg called satiety; but Virtue does not much heed that; like the
woman she is, she only notes that Sin drives a pair of ponies in the
sunshine, while she herself is often left to plod wearily through the
everlasting falling rain. So she dubs us "cynics" and leaves us--who can
wonder if we won't follow her through the rain? Sin smiles so merrily if
she makes us pay toll at the end; whereas Virtue--ah me, Virtue _will_
find such virtue in frowning!
* * *
Women always put me in mind of that bird of yours, the cuckoo.
Your poetry and your platitudes have all combined to attach a most
sentimental value to cuckoos and women. All sorts of pretty phantasies
surround them both; the springtide of the year, the breath of early
flowers, the verse of old dead poets, the scent of sweet summer rains,
the light of bright dewy dawns--all these things you have mingled with
the thought of the cuckoo, till its first call through the woods in
April brings all these memories with it. Just so in like manner have you
entangled your poetic ideals, your dreams of peace and purity, all
divinities of patience and of pity, all sweet saintly sacrifice and
sorrow, with your ideas of women.
Well--cuckoos and women, believe me, are very much like each other, and
not at all like your phantasy:--to get a well-feathered nest without the
trouble of making it, and to keep easily in it themselves, no matter who
may turn out in the cold, is both cuckoo and woman all over; and, while
you quote Herrick and Wordsworth about them as you walk in the dewy
greenwood, they are busy slaying the poor lonely fledglings, that their
own young may lie snug and warm.
* * *
"Then everybody is a hypocrite?"
"Not a bit, child. We always like what we haven't got; and people are
quite honest very often in their professions, though they give the lie
direct to them in their practice. People can talk themselves into
believing that they believe anything. When the preacher discourses on
the excellence of holiness, he may have been a thoroughgoing scamp all
his life; but it don't follow he's dishonest, because he's so accustomed
to talk goody-goody talk that it runs off his lips as the thread off a
reel----"
"But he must know he's a scamp?"
"Good gracious me, why should he? I have met a thousand scamps; but I
never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.
Bless you, my dear, a man no more sees himself, as others see him, in a
moral looking-glass, than he does in a mirror out of his dressing-box. I
know a man who has forged bills, run off with his neighbour's wife, and
left sixty thousand pounds odd in debts behind him; but he only thinks
himself 'a victim of circumstances'--honestly thinks it too. A man never
is so honest as when he speaks well of himself. Men are always optimists
when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them."
I yawned a little; nothing is so pleasant, as I have known later, as to
display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a
trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.
When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you
are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only--What a
crib from Rochefoucauld!
_TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES._
Brussels has stones that are sermons, or rather that are quaint,
touching, illuminated legends of the middle ages, which those who run
may read.
Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of
woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.
The city has its ways and wiles of Paris. It decks itself with white and
gold. It has music under its trees and soldiers in its streets, and
troops marching and counter-marching along its sunny avenues. It has
blue and pink, and yellow and green, on its awnings and on its
house-fronts. It has a merry open-air life on its pavements at little
marble tables before little gay-coloured cafés. It has gilded balconies
and tossing flags and comic operas, and leisurely pleasure-seekers, and
tries always to believe and make the world believe that it is Paris in
very truth.
But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse and the foreigners.
There is a Brussels that is better than this--a Brussels that belongs to
the old burgher-life, to the artists and the craftsmen, to the master
masons of Moyen-age, to the same spirit and soul that once filled the
free men of Ghent and the citizens of Bruges and the besieged of Leyden,
and the blood of Egmont and of Horne.
Down there by the water-side, where the old quaint walls lean over the
yellow sluggish stream, and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges
swing against the dusky piles of the crumbling bridges:
In the grey square desolate courts of the old palaces, where in
cobwebbed galleries and silent chambers the Flemish tapestries drop to
pieces:
In the great populous square, where, above the clamorous and rushing
crowds, the majestic front of the Maison du Roi frowns against the sun,
and the spires and pinnacles of the Burgomaster's gathering-halls tower
into the sky in all the fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy:
Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the stillness of the
cathedral, across whose sunny aisles some little child goes slowly all
alone, laden with lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their
white glory hides its curly head:
In all strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn from men in silent
grass-grown corners, where a twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of
roses, or a Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool-warehouse, or a water-spout
with a grinning faun's head laughs in the grim humour of the Moyen-age
above the bent head of a young lace-worker;----
In all these, Brussels, although more worldly than her sisters of Ghent
and Bruges, and far more worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of Freiburg
and Nürnberg, Brussels is in her own way still like some monkish story,
mixed up with the Romaunt of the Rose, or rather like some light French
vaudeville, all jests and smiles, illustrated in motley contrast with
helm and hauberk, cope and cowl, praying knights and fighting priests,
winged griffins and nimbused saints, flame-breathing dragons and
enamoured princes, all mingled together in the illuminated colours and
the heroical grotesque romance of the Middle Ages.
And it was this side of the city that Bébée knew, and she loved it well
and would not leave it for the market of the Madeleine.
* * *
It was a warm grey evening, the streets were full; there were blossoms
in all the balconies, and gay colours in all the dresses. The old tinker
put his tools together and whispered to her--
"Bébée, as it is your feast-day, come and stroll in St. Hubert's
gallery, and I will buy you a horn of sugarplums or a ribbon, and we can
see the puppet-show afterwards, eh?"
But the children were waiting at home: she would not spend the evening
in the city; she only thought she would just kneel a moment in the
cathedral and say a little prayer or two for a minute--the saints were
so good in giving her so many friends.
There is something very touching in the Netherlander's relation with his
Deity. It is all very vague to him; a jumble of veneration and
familiarity, of sanctity and profanity, without any thought of being
familiar, or any idea of being profane.
There is a homely poetry, an innocent affectionateness, in it
characteristic of the people.
He talks to his good angel Michel, and to his friend that dear little
Jesus, much as he would talk to the shoemaker over the way, or the
cooper's child in the doorway.
It is a very unreasonable, foolish, clumsy sort of religion, this
theology in wooden shoes; it is half grotesque, half pathetic; the
grandmothers pass it on to the grandchildren, as they pass the bowl of
potatoes round the stove in the long winter nights; it is as silly as
possible, but it comforts them as they carry faggots over the frozen
canals or wear their eyes blind over the squares of lace; and it has in
it the supreme pathos of a perfect confidence, of an utter childlike and
undoubting trust.
This had been taught to Bébée, and she went to sleep every night in the
firm belief that the sixteen little angels of the Flemish prayer kept
watch and ward over her bed.
* * *
She said her prayer, and thanked the saints for all their gifts and
goodness, her clasped hands against her silver shield; her basket on the
pavement by her; abovehead the sunset rays streaming purple and crimson
and golden through the painted windows that are the wonder of the world.
When her prayer was done she still kneeled there; her head thrown back
to watch the light; her hands clasped still; and on her upturned face
the look that made the people say, "What does she see?--the angels or
the dead?"
She forgot everything. She forgot the cherries at home, and the children
even. She was looking upward at the stories of the painted panes; she
was listening to the message of the dying sun-rays; she was feeling
vaguely, wistfully, unutterably the tender beauty of the sacred place
and the awful wonder of the world in which she with her sixteen years
was all alone, like a little blue cornflower amongst the wheat that goes
for grist, and the barley that makes men drunk.
For she was alone, though she had so many friends. Quite alone
sometimes, for God had been cruel to her, and had made her a lark
without song.
* * *
He went leisurely, travelling up the bright Meuse river, and across the
monotony of the plains, then green with wheat a foot high, and musical
with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in the quaint old-world
villages.
There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harmless, so mediæval, in
the Flemish life, that it soothed him. He had been swimming all his life
in salt, sea-fed rapids; this sluggish, dull canal-water, mirroring
between its rushes a life that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a
charm for him.
He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is ugly and beautiful; it is
like a dull, quaint, grès de Flandre jug, that has precious stones set
inside its rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, of sale and
barter, of loss and gain; but in the heart of it there are illuminated
leaves of missal vellum, all gold and colour, and monkish story and
heroic ballad, that could only have been executed in the days when Art
was a religion.
* * *
"Oh--to-morrow perhaps, or next year--or when Fate fancies.
"Or rather--when I choose," he thought to himself, and let his eyes rest
with a certain pleasure on the little feet that went beside him in the
grass, and the pretty neck that showed ever and again, as the frills of
her linen bodice were blown back by the wind, and her own quick motion.
Bébée looked also up at him; he was very handsome, or seemed so to her,
after the broad, blunt, characterless faces of the Brabantois around
her. He walked with an easy grace, he was clad in picture-like velvets,
he had a beautiful poetic head, and eyes like deep-brown waters, and a
face like one of Jordaens' or Rembrandt's cavaliers in the galleries
where she used to steal in of a Sunday, and look up at the paintings,
and dream of what that world could be in which those people had lived.
"_You_ are of the people of Rubes' country, are you not?" she asked him.
"Of what country, my dear?"
"Of the people that live in the gold frames," said Bébée, quite
seriously. "In the galleries, you know. I know a charwoman that scrubs
the floors of the Arenenberg, and she lets me in sometimes to look--and
you are just like those great gentlemen in the gold frames, only you
have not a hawk and a sword, and they always have. I used to wonder
where they came from, for they are not like any of us one bit, and the
charwoman--she is Lisa Dredel, and lives in the street of the Pot
d'Etain--always said, 'Dear heart, they all belong to Rubes' land--we
never see their like now-a-days.' But _you_ must come out of Rubes'
land--at least, I think so; do you not?"
He caught her meaning; he knew that Rubes was the homely abbreviation of
Rubens, that all the Netherlanders used, and he guessed the idea that
was reality to this little, lonely, fanciful mind.
"Perhaps I do," he answered her with a smile, for it was not worth his
while to disabuse her thoughts of any imagination that glorified him to
her. "Do you not want to see Rubes' world, little one? To see the gold
and the grandeur, and the glitter of it all?--never to toil or get
tired?--always to move in a pageant?--always to live like the hawks in
the paintings you talk of, with silver bells hung round you, and a hood
all sewn with pearls?"
"No," said Bébée, simply. "I should like to see it--just to see it, as
one looks through a grating into the king's grapehouses here. But I
should not like to live in it. I love my hut, and the starling, and the
chickens--and what would the garden do without me?--and the children,
and the old Annémie? I could not anyhow, anywhere be any happier than I
am. There is only one thing I wish."
"And what is that?"
"To know something. Not to be so ignorant. Just look--I can read a
little, it is true; my hours, and the letters, and when Krebs brings in
a newspaper I can read a little of it--not much. I know French well,
because Antoine was French himself, and never did talk Flemish to me;
and they, being Flemish, cannot, of course, read the newspapers at all,
and so think it very wonderful indeed in me. But what I want is to know
things, to know all about what _was_ before ever I was living. Ste.
Gudule now--they say it was built hundreds of years before; and Rubes
again--they say he was a painter-king in Antwerpen before the oldest
woman like Annémie ever began to count time. I am sure books tell you
all those things, because I see the students coming and going with them;
and when I saw once the millions of books in the Rue de la Musée, I
asked the keeper what use they were for, and he said, 'to make men wise,
my dear.' But Bac the cobbler, who was with me,--it was a fête day--Bac,
_he_ said, 'Do you not believe that, Bébée? they only muddle folk's
brains; for one book tells them one thing, and another book another, and
so on, till they are dazed with all the contrary lying; and if you see a
bookish man, be sure you see a very poor creature who could not hoe a
patch, or kill a pig, or stitch an upper-leather, were it ever so.' But
I do not believe that Bac said right. Did he?"
"I am not sure. On the whole, I think it is the truest remark on
literature I have ever heard, and one that shows great judgment in Bac.
Well?"
"Well--sometimes, you know," said Bébée, not understanding his answer,
but pursuing her thoughts confidentially; "sometimes I talk like this to
the neighbours, and they laugh at me. Because Mère Krebs says that when
one knows how to spin, and sweep, and make bread, and say one's prayers,
and milk a goat or a cow, it is all a woman wants to know this side of
heaven. But for me, I cannot help it--when I look at those windows in
the cathedral, or at those beautiful twisted little spires that are all
over our Hôtel de Ville, I want to know who the men were that made
them--what they did and thought--how they looked and spoke--how they
learned to shape stone into leaves and grasses like that--how they could
imagine all those angel faces on the glass. When I go alone in the quite
early morning or at night when it is still--sometimes in winter I have
to stay till it is dark over the lace--I hear their feet come after me,
and they whisper to me close, 'Look what beautiful things we have done,
Bébée, and you all forget us quite. We did what never will die, but our
names are as dead as the stones.' And then I am so sorry for them and
ashamed. And I want to know more. Can you tell me?"
He looked at her earnestly; her eyes were shining, her cheeks were warm,
her little mouth was tremulous with eagerness.
"Did any one ever speak to you in that way?" he asked her.
"No," she answered him. "It comes into my head of itself. Sometimes I
think the cathedral angels put it there. For the angels must be tired,
you know; always pointing to God and always seeing men turn away. I used
to tell Antoine sometimes. But he used to shake his head and say that it
was no use thinking; most likely Ste. Gudule and St. Michael had set the
church down in the night all ready made--why not? God made the trees,
and they were more wonderful, he thought, for his part. And so perhaps
they are, but that is no answer. And I do _want_ to know. I want some
one who will tell me,--and if you come out of Rubes' country as I think,
no doubt you know everything, or remember it?"
He smiled.
* * *
The Sun came and touched the lichens of the roof into gold.
Bébée smiled at it gaily as it rose above the tops of the trees, and
shone on all the little villages scattered over the plains.