IN WHICH, AFTER EXCEEDINGLY TEDIOUS TALK ABOUT THE WISE EXPENDITURE
OF SUPERFLUOUS CASH, AN IDLER IS SET TO WORK
"Riches," said Miss Gold, "are a great responsibility. I want to be
altruistic, but I want to be sure--or as sure as possible--of the
money going in the right way."
Trist, who had come down to Esher with me, smiled cynically.
"There are hospitals and so forth, I know," Miss Gold continued, "but
this mere writing of cheques seems to me such a cowardly thing. I
feel that one ought to think so hard before every gift. I not only
feel that, but I must confess to wanting a little fun for my money
too. The solving of the problem how to spend it wisely is indeed my
chief hobby."
"A very fascinating one," I said.
"Yes," she replied, "so fascinating that when people calling here
say, 'Oh, Miss Gold, how kind and charitable you are!' I blush,
because I know that although it may look like kindness and charity it
is really nothing whatever but self-indulgence."
"My dear Miss Gold," said Trist, "my dear Miss Gold, may I implore
you not to begin that. Between us three, let it be understood from
the outset that there is no such thing as unselfishness."
She laughed. "Very well," she said, "but, none the less, the thought
is with me continually. I take it for granted one minute, and the
next I am up in arms against it."
"If you are at all troubled about small benefactions," I said, "I
must bring Miss Wynne to see you. She could help in the little ways
so very sensibly."
"I should love to see her," said Miss Gold. "Every one whom one can
trust to do a few little things is so valuable; but it is the large
sums that are the hardest nuts to crack. I have so much, you know,
and I can spend so little. This house costs practically nothing; I
want no clothes; the doctor is almost my heaviest expense, and really
I could do without him, because whether he comes or whether he
doesn't this thing has got to go on getting worse. That is fixed."
My poor Agnes.
"I have had the most fantastic ideas," she hurried on. "I'll tell
you of one of them. You know Burns's lines about resisting
temptation? They're in that green book on the second shelf, there;
the fourth from the end. It is Cunningham's edition, and came from
your shop. The book-mark is in the place."
I found them.
"Read them aloud," Miss Gold commanded.
I did so--
"Then gently scan your brother Man,
Still gentlier sister Woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin' wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving _Why_ they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark
How far perhaps they rue it.
Who made the heart, 'tis _He_ alone
Decidedly can try us,
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's _done_ we partly may compute,
But know not what's _resisted_."
"Well," she said, "what do you think I did? I wrote to a thousand
clergymen, chosen at random from the directory, and asked if I might
be allowed to defray the cost of having these lines suitably
illuminated in gold in some part of their church. Many did not
answer at all; others refused straightforwardly on their own
responsibility; many said that they themselves would like to give
permission, but their bishops would not approve. One only asked me
to do it, and I did it; but I have a notion, from the report of a spy
that I sent down, that a hatchment has since been hung over it."
"You might," said Trist, "have offered to strike a bargain with them.
In place, for example, of the tenth commandment, which was devised
for the well-being of an Eastern tribe in camp, and has no bearing
whatever at the present day in a civilisation that demands Sunday
labour of most kinds, from cooking to shunting, and is broken perhaps
most flagrantly by the clergymen who enunciate it at so much a year
(yes, and call it work too, holding their poor foreheads as they tell
you of their weary life)--you might have offered Burns's lines in
place of that. Burns at any rate touches real life, whereas the
presence of that law on the walls of the chancel has merely an
archæological value."
"Yes," said Miss Gold, "but we must not look for logic."
"Nor," said Trist, "in a social society like the Church for courage."
"I don't blame the clergymen," I said. "They have to live. Better,
they very properly thought, go on with elemental condemnations than
let in the thin end of such a dangerous wedge as imaginative
understanding."
"The New Testament," said Trist, "will never catch up with the Old in
this country. The Old is certainly the best from the point of view
of men who have to bring up families. Trade unionism must be very
wary, and look ahead."
"Why didn't you go on to offer the verses to the Nonconformists?" I
asked.
"I was discouraged," she said. "That is one of the temptations to
which I most easily fall a prey--discouragement. I felt I could not
reopen the project."
"You might have given it a turn," I said. "For example, in my
Chinese book it is written of Wang Kung-i, of the seventh century
A.D., that on being asked by the Emperor Kao Tsung to explain the
secret of the harmony in which three generations of his family had
lived, he wrote the single word 'Forbearance' many times. You might
have offered them that anecdote, and entitled it 'A Lesson from a
Heathen Land,' and therefore, even if apposite, negligible here.
Every one, then, would be pleased."
"Of course," said Miss Gold, "money is really the last instrument
with which benevolence, charity, altruism, whatever you call it,
works; but most of us, being in a hurry, put it first. The first
really is thought. I will give you an example of what I call the
truest thought for others, and one which to my mind, if not to the
Rontgen-rayed eye of a cynical bachelor, really involves
self-sacrifice. I have a friend who spends a great deal of her
time--how do you think? In writing letters to prisoners in the
gaols. They are pious letters, full of appeals to the better nature
and reminders of Christ's loving-kindness and the chance that remains
to every one. They must, to a large extent, merely reproduce the
ordinary solace that is offered by the chaplains and visitors; but
this lady writes them herself, very carefully and legibly, and she
employs several of her nieces to paint flowers on the top of each
piece of note-paper. She is a wealthy and an intellectual woman, and
might be much more congenially employed: but she does this because
she wants to do something to alleviate the lot of the outcast. It
seems to me a very beautiful deed."
"How I envy her!" I said.
"Envy?"
"Yes, her singleness of mind. I could not do it; not only because I
should not dare to offer such solace, but also because my sympathy
would be too much with them. I should feel, in the case of so many,
that their imprisonment was the real offence rather than the
so-called crime that took them there, and that would stay my hand.
The letter that I should write would be a letter that would never
pass the governor's office. Take, for example, a starving man who
stole bread, and is in prison for that. It would be too cruel a
mockery to comfort him with evangelical maxims. Hunger comes before
conduct and far before religion. Another man might be there for
debt, which is quite as often the result of accident as turpitude.
Another might have merely killed the middle-aged seducer of a child
of tender years. It is too difficult. I am too uncertain."
"Yes," said Miss Gold. "I am a little like that too; we are too
complex for charity, you and I. In all probability we are merely
meddling busy-bodies, groping towards what we hope is light, but
doing harm by the way."
"I agree with you entirely," said Trist, who had been silent for some
time. "My suspicion is that no one can do anything for any one; and
my belief is that certain persons with soft hearts are doomed to ruin
where they would assist. Most of the charitable are
wreckers--certainly the cheque-writers are, and certainly I am. I
have proved it again and again; but I shall probably go on, since
resistance is so difficult and one is usually so much wiser than
one's deeds. I will give you an example. I once did such an
apparently harmless thing as to give a tailor's assistant a season
ticket for Earl's Court. It admitted one only and he could not
afford a shilling a night for his wife; he went every night alone;
their home life was interrupted and then destroyed, and they have
never been happy since. That, of course, was an error on my part.
Had I thought a little longer I should have realised that the ticket
was putting him, as the saying is, above himself, and have held my
hand.
"That is one example. I could give you many others," Trist
continued, "all of which convince me that I am a danger to society
and ought to be locked up for giving money away as surely as any of
your kind friend's prisoners are locked up for abstracting it."
"This is very terrible," said Miss Gold.
"Well, I believe it to be true of myself," Trist said; "others may
have better fortune; but for the most part the feckless should be
left alone. It sounds brutal, but after my experience you will
acquit me of wishing to speak brutally. England, as I said before,
is an Old Testament country, and had better be left to it.
Christianity meddles."
"That means," I said, "not the cessation of charity but the
materialisation of it. Manna and quails once more. And a very good
thing too."
"Certainly," said Miss Gold.
"Those stanzas of yours," I went on, "might have a serious
undermining influence on the single-minded. Is it worth while to
interfere with such an accepted beatitude as 'Blessed are the
untempted, for they shall be accounted the best men?'"
"Yes," said Trist, "but that expresses only part of the case. The
real wording should be, 'Blessed are those who escape the prohibited
temptations, for they shall be reputed the best men.' Avarice, for
example, which the author of the beatitudes loathed with all his
magnificent loathing, has become a very popular and highly esteemed
temptation. A man indeed practically writes himself down both fool
and failure if he does not succumb to it.
"Meekness also has gone out, although my own private opinion is that
when Christ extolled the meek and promised them their inheritance, he
was speaking ironically (as he often must have been), and the earth
they were to inherit was a piece six feet by two."
Miss Gold liked that. "You should write a commentary," she said.
"We want every point of view to be expressed, whether it's right or
wrong; and I imagine," she added, "that no honest point of view can
possibly be wholly wrong."
"As to temptation," I said, "take my own case. In the ordinary usage
of the word, I am from temptation almost wholly free. I have the
good or ill fortune to possess a mind that can occupy itself happily
almost without a break, like a bee in that herbaceous border out
there. Vice does not beckon me with any alluring finger; I am ill at
once if I over-eat; I am ill the next day if I drink too much; and I
care more for health than for the immediate pleasure of such
excesses. I have a sufficient income; I do not desire more. I have
no tendency to be a scandal-monger. The result is, that I am
accounted a good man; the nice gentleman over Bemerton's, they
probably call me in the neighbourhood; very likely mothers point me
out as a model. But I am not deceived. I know perfectly well that
the certificate is based not as it should be on what I do but on what
I do not do. It is a negative honour that I enjoy or endure. Every
time a wretched, besotted tippler tramples down the craving to have
another drink, and thus saves twopence for his wife, he is a better
man than I, who have no craving to conquer--except the craving (if I
can apply to it so strong a word) not to have any craving; and that I
submit to. Do you remember, Trist, that we were discussing this very
question some years ago at Bentley's, and I claimed to have no
temptations, when a shrewd being who knew me well remarked, 'Oh yes,
you have, Falconer; your temptation is to be tolerant; you can find
little twopenny-halfpenny faults with things, but you can't condemn.'
Do you remember that? It was true then, and it is even more true
now, when I am many years older. If a man can't condemn at
twenty-five, he certainly will not at fifty, when he knows so much
more of life and more than ever is conscious of the other side.
Angels have their advocate as well as the devil, and both perhaps are
unfair. The superficial may call me good, but before God I am only
amiable."
"And yet," said Trist, "there was a fallacy in the criticism, for to
be tolerant or intolerant is not a matter of will. When the drunkard
tightens his fist on his twopence, and walks resolutely away from the
public-house, he is deliberately resisting temptation at the command
of his own will. Similarly, when a reviewer refrains from saying too
hard a thing, for justice, about a book by a man whom he dislikes, or
too kind a thing, for justice, about a book by a man whom he likes,
he is deliberately resisting temptation at the command of his own
will. But it is not a matter of will with you to be tolerant. It is
temperament. And you are tolerant because you never made up your
mind as to right and wrong."
"And never shall," I said. "As a child I had no doubts; but now?
Take, for instance, telling the truth. I was brought up to believe
that one should do that, and I knew a lie a mile off. But now I see
that mendacity, or at any rate the suppression of one's real feelings
and opinions, is the cement that binds society together."
"And yet truth," said Miss Gold, "is the only really interesting
thing. But I have had enough ethics for one day, particularly as
everything that Mr. Trist says is directed against the usefulness of
the only hobby I possess. Tell me, Mr. Trist," she went on, "would
you think this a dangerous scheme?--to hang one good picture, not an
original, of course, but a really fine reproduction, in every common
room of every workhouse in England."
"No," he said, "not even with a microscope could I find peril in
that."
"Well," she said, "if I give you _carte blanche_, will you do that
for me and so get back a little belief as to your usefulness? Will
you find the pictures and arrange for their framing? I will
communicate with the Guardians, because I know you could never bring
yourself to do that. But will you help me over the pictures?"
And Trist said he would.
"I shall have a little work for you very soon, Kent," Miss Gold said
to me as we left "It is time you did something."