yonder." He waved a palm-leaf fan in the direction of Mission
Dolores among the sandhills. Then without a moment's pause, and in
a low and melancholy voice, he continued: "Young feller, all patent
machinery is a monopoly, and don't you try to bust it or else it will
bust you. 'Bout five years ago I was at Bow Flume--a minin'-town
way back yonder--beyond the Sacramento. I ran a saloon there with
O'Grady--Howlin' O'Grady, so called on account of the noise he made
when intoxicated. I never christened my saloon any high-soundin'
name, but owing to my happy trick of firing out men who was too full
of bug-juice and disposed to be promiscuous in their dealin's, the
boys called it 'The Wake Up an' Git Bar.' O'Grady, my partner, was an
unreasonable inventorman. He invented a check on the whisky bar'ls
that wasn't no good except lettin' the whisky run off at odd times and
shutting down when a man was most thirstiest. I remember half Bow Flume
city firing their six-shooters into a cask--and Bourbon at that--which
was refusing to run on account of O'Grady's patent double-check tap.
But that wasn't what I started to tell you about--not by a long ways.
O'Grady went to 'Frisco when the Bow Flume saloon was booming. He hed
a good time in 'Frisco, kase he came back with a very bad head and no
clothes worth talkin' about. He had been jailed most time, but he had
investigated the mechanism of these cars yonder--when he wasn't in the
cage. He came back with the liquor for the saloon, and the boys whooped
round him for half a day, singing songs of glory. 'Boys,' says O'Grady,
when a half of Bow Flume were lying on the floor kissing the cuspidors
and singing 'Way Down the Swanee River,' being full of some new stuff
O'Grady had got up from 'Frisco--'boys,' says O'Grady, 'I have the
makings of a company in me. You know the road from this saloon to Bow
Flume is bad and 'most perpendicular.' That was the exact state of
the case. Bow Flume city was three hundred feet above our saloon. The
boys used to roll down and get full, and any that happened to be sober
rolled them up again when the time came to get. Some dropped into the
cañon that way--bad payers mostly. You see, a man held all the hill
Bow Flume was built on, and he wanted forty thousand dollars for a
forty-five by hundred lot o' ground. We kept the whisky and the boys
came down for it. The exercise disposed them to thirst. 'Boys,' says
O'Grady, 'as you know, I have visited the great metropolis of 'Frisco.'
Then they had drinks all round for 'Frisco. 'And I have been jailed a
few while enjoying the sights.' Then they had drinks all round for the
jail that held O'Grady. 'But,' he says, 'I have a proposal to make.'
More drinks on account of the proposal. 'I have got a hold of the idea
of those 'Frisco cable-cars. Some of the idea I got in 'Frisco. The
rest I have invented,' says O'Grady. Then they drank all round for the
invention.
"I am coming to the point. O'Grady made a company--the drunkest I ever
saw--to run a cable-car on the 'Frisco model from 'Wake Up an' Git
Saloon' to Bow Flume. The boys put in about four thousand dollars,
for Bow Flume was squirling gold then. There's nary shanty there now.
O'Grady put in four thousand dollars of his own, and I was roped in for
as much. O'Grady desired the concern to represent the resources of Bow
Flume. We got a car built in 'Frisco for two thousand dollars, with an
elegant bar at one end--nickel-plated fixings and ruby glass.
"The notion was to dispense liquor _en route_. A Bow Flume man could
put himself outside two drinks in a minute and a half, the same not
being pressed for urgent business. The boys graded the road for love,
and we run a rope in a little trough in the middle. That rope ran
swift, and any blame fool that had his foot cut off, fooling in the
middle of the road, might ha' found salvation by using our Bow Flume
Palace Car. The boys said that was square. O'Grady took the contract
for building the engine to wind the rope. He called his show a mule--it
was a crossbreed between a threshing machine and an elevator ram.
I don't think he had followed the 'Frisco patterns. He put all our
dollars into that blamed barroom on the car, knowing what would please
the boys best. They didn't care much about the machinery, so long as
the car hummed.
"We charged the boys a dollar a head per trip. One free drink included.
That paid--paid like--Paradise. They liked the motion. O'Grady was
engineer, and another man sort of tended to the rope engine when he
wasn't otherwise engaged. Those cable-cars run by gripping on to the
rope. You know that. When the grip's off the car is braked down and
stands still. There ought to have been two cars by right--one to run up
and the other down. But O'Grady had a blamed invention for reversing
the engine, so the cable ran both ways--up to Bow Flume and down to
the saloon--the terminus being in front of our door. A man could kick
a friend slick from the bar into the car. The boys appreciated that.
The Bow Flume Palace Car Company earned twenty on the hundred in three
months, besides the profits of the drinks. We might have lasted to this
day if O'Grady hadn't tinkered his blamed engine up on top of Bow Flume
Hill. The boys complained the show didn't hum sufficient. They required
railroad speed. O'Grady ran 'em up and down at fourteen miles an hour;
and his latest improvement was to touch twenty-four. The strain on the
brakes was terrible--quite terrible. But every time O'Grady raised the
record, the boys gave him a testimonial. 'Twasn't in human nature not
to crowd ahead after that. Testimonials demoralise the publickest of
men.
"I rode on the car that memorial day. Just as we started with a double
load of boys and a razzle-dazzle assortment of drinks, something
went _zip_ under the car bottom. We proceeded with velocity. All the
prominent members of the company were aboard. 'The grip has got
snubbed on the rope,' says O'Grady quite quietly. 'Boys, this will
be the biggest smash on record. Something's going to happen.' We
proceeded at the rate of twenty-four miles an hour till the end of
our journey. I don't know what happened there. We could get clear of
the rope anyways at the point where it turned round a pulley to start
up hill again. We struck--struck the stoop of the 'Wake Up an' Git
Saloon'--_my_ saloon--and the next thing I knew was feeling of my legs
under an assortment of matchwood and broken glass, representing liquor
and fixtures to the tune of eight thousand. The car had been flicked
through the saloon, bringing down the entire roof on the floor. It
had then bucked out into the firmament, describing a parabola over
the bluff at the back of the saloon, and was lying at the foot of
that bluff, three hundred feet below, like a busted kaleidoscope--all
nickel, shavings and bits of red glass. O'Grady and most of the
prominent members of the company were dead--very dead--and there wasn't
enough left of the saloon to pay for a drink. I took in the situation
lying on my stomach at the edge of the bluff, and I suspicioned that
any lawsuits that might arise would be complicated by shooting. So I
quit Bow Flume by the back trail. I guess the coroner judged that there
were no summons--leastways I never heard any more about it. Since that
time I've had a distrust to cable-cars. The rope breaking is no great
odds, bekase you can stop the car, but it's getting the grip tangled
with the running rope that spreads ruin and desolation over thriving
communities and prevents the development of local resources."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 19: "Turnovers," Vol. VII.]
IN PARTIBUS[20]
_The 'buses run to Battersea,
The 'buses run to Bow,
The 'buses run to Westbourne Grove,
And Nottinghill also;
But I am sick of London town,
From Shepherd's Bush to Bow._
I see the smut upon my cuff
And feel him on my nose;
I cannot leave my window wide
When gentle zephyr blows,
Because he brings disgusting things
And drops 'em on my "clo'es."
The sky, a greasy soup-toureen,
Shuts down atop my brow.
Yes, I have sighed for London town
And I have got it now:
And half of it is fog and filth,
And half is fog and row.
And when I take my nightly prowl,
'Tis passing good to meet
The pious Briton lugging home
His wife and daughter sweet,
Through four packed miles of seething vice,
Thrust out upon the street.
Earth holds no horror like to this
In any land displayed,
From Suez unto Sandy Hook,
From Calais to Port Said;
And 'twas to hide their heathendom
The beastly fog was made.
I cannot tell when dawn is near,
Or when the day is done,
Because I always see the gas
And never see the sun,
And now, methinks, I do not care
A cuss for either one.
But stay, there was an orange, or
An aged egg its yolk;
It might have been a Pears' balloon
Or Barnum's latest joke:
I took it for the sun and wept
To watch it through the smoke.
It's Oh to see the morn ablaze
Above the mango-tope,
When homeward through the dewy cane
The little jackals lope,
And half Bengal heaves into view,
New-washed--with sunlight soap.
It's Oh for one deep whisky peg
When Christmas winds are blowing,
When all the men you ever knew,
And all you've ceased from knowing,
Are "entered for the Tournament,
And everything that's going."
But I consort with long-haired things
In velvet collar-rolls,
Who talk about the Aims of Art,
And "theories" and "goals,"
And moo and coo with women-folk
About their blessed souls.
But that they call "psychology"
Is lack of liver pill,
And all that blights their tender souls
Is eating till they're ill,
And their chief way of winning goals
Consists in sitting still.
It's Oh to meet an Army man,
Set up, and trimmed and taut,
Who does not spout hashed libraries
Or think the next man's thought,
And walks as though he owned himself,
And hogs his bristles short.
Hear now, a voice across the seas
To kin beyond my ken,
If ye have ever filled an hour
With stories from my pen,
For pity's sake send some one here
To bring me news of men!
_The 'buses run to Islington,
To Highgate and Soho,
To Hammersmith and Kew therewith,
And Camberwell also,
But I can only murmur "'Bus"
From Shepherd's Bush to Bow._
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 20: "Turnovers," Vol. VIII.]
LETTERS ON LEAVE[21]
I
To Lieutenant John McHail,
151st (Kumharsen) P.N.I.,
_Hakaiti via Tharanda_,
_Assam_.
Dear Old Man: Your handwriting is worse than ever, but as far as I can
see among the loops and fish-hooks, you are lonesome and want to be
comforted with a letter. I knew you wouldn't write to me unless you
needed something. You don't tell me that you have left your regiment,
but from what you say about "my battalion," "my men," and so forth, it
seems as if you were raising military police for the benefit of the
Chins. If that's the case, I congratulate you. The pay is good. Ouless
writes to me from some new fort something or other, saying that he
has struggled into a billet of Rs. 700 (Military Police), and instead
of being chased by writters as he used to be, is ravaging the country
round Shillong in search of a wife. I am very sorry for the Mrs. Ouless
of the future.
That doesn't matter. You probably know more about the boys yonder than
I do. If you'll only send me from time to time some record of their
movements I'll try to tell you of things on this side of the water. You
say "You don't know what it is to hear from town." I say "You don't
know what it is to hear from the _dehat_." Now and again men drift
in with news, but I don't like hot-weather _khubber_. It's all of
the domestic occurrence kind. Old "Hat" Constable came to see me the
other day. You remember the click in his throat before he begins to
speak. He sat still, clicking at quarter-hour intervals, and after each
click he'd say: "D'ye remember Mistress So-an'-So? Well, she's dead o'
typhoid at Naogong." When it wasn't "Mistress So-an'-So" it was a man.
I stood four clicks and four deaths, and then I asked him to spare me
the rest. You seem to have had a bad season, taking it all round, and
the women seem to have suffered most. Is that so?
We don't die in London. We go out of town, and we make as much fuss
about it as if we were going to the Neva. Now I understand why the
transport is the first thing to break down when our army takes the
field. The Englishman is cumbrous in his movements and very particular
about his baskets and hampers and trunks--not less than seven of
each--for a fifty-mile journey. Leave season began some weeks ago, and
there is a _burra-choop_ along the streets that you could shovel with
a spade. All the people that say they are everybody have gone--quite
two hundred miles away. Some of 'em are even on the Continent--and the
clubs are full of strange folk. I found a Reform man at the Savage a
week ago. He didn't say what his business was, but he was dusty and
looked hungry. I suppose he had come in for food and shelter.
Like the rest I'm on leave too. I converted myself into a Government
Secretary, awarded myself one month on full pay with the chance of an
extension, and went off. Then it rained and hailed, and rained again,
and I ran up and down this tiny country in trains trying to find a dry
place. After ten days I came back to town, having been stopped by the
sea four times. I was rather like a kitten at the bottom of a bucke
chasing its own tail. So I'm sitting here under a grey, muggy sky
wondering what sort of time they are having at Simla. It's August now.
The rains would be nearly over, all the theatricals would be in full
swing, and Jakko Hill would be just Paradise. You're probably pink with
prickly heat. Sit down quietly under the punkah and think of Umballa
station, hot as an oven at four in the morning. Think of the dak-gharry
slobbering in the wet, and the first little cold wind that comes round
the first corner after the tonga is clear of Kalka. There's a wind
you and I know well. It's blowing over the grass at Dugshai this
very moment, and there's a smell of hot fir trees all along and along
from Solon to Simla, and some happy man is flying up that road with
fragments of a tonga-bar in his eye, his pet terrier under his arm, his
thick clothes on the back-seat and the certainty of a month's pure joy
in front of him. _Instead of which_ you're being stewed at Hakaiti and
I'm sitting in a second-hand atmosphere above a sausage-shop, watching
three sparrows playing in a dirty-green tree and pretending that it's
summer. I have a view of very many streets and a river. Except the
advertisements on the walls, there isn't one speck of colour as far
as my eye can reach. The very cat, who is an amiable beast, comes
off black under my hand, and I daren't open the window for fear of
smuts. And this is better than a soaked and sobbled country, with the
corn-shocks standing like plover's eggs in green moss and the oats
lying flat in moist lumps. We haven't had any summer, and yesterday I
smelt the raw touch of the winter. Just one little whiff to show that
the year had turned. "Oh, what a happy land is England!"
I cannot understand the white man at home. You remember when we went
out together and landed at the Apollo Bunder with all our sorrows
before us, and went to Watson's Hotel and saw the snake-charmers? You
said: "It'll take me all my lifetime to distinguish one nigger from
another." That was eight years ago. Now you don't call them niggers
any more, and you're supposed--quite wrongly--to have an insight into
native character, or else you would never have been allowed to recruit
for the Kumharsens. I feel as I felt at Watson's. They are so deathlily
alike, especially the more educated. They all seem to read the same
books, and the same newspapers telling 'em what to admire in the same
books, and they all quote the same passages from the same books, and
they write books on books about somebody else's books, and they are
penetrated to their boot-heels with a sense of the awful seriousness
of their own views of the moment. Above that they seem to be, most
curiously and beyond the right of ordinary people, divorced from the
knowledge or fear of death. Of course, every man conceives that every
man except himself is bound to die (you remember how Hallatt spoke the
night before he went out), but these men appear to be like children in
that respect.
I can't explain exactly, but it gives an air of unreality to their
most earnest earnestnesses; and when a young man of views and culture
and aspirations is in earnest, the trumpets of Jericho are silent
beside him. Because they have everything done for them they know how
everything ought to be done; and they are perfectly certain that wood
pavements, policemen, shops and gaslight come in the regular course
of nature. You can guess with these convictions how thoroughly and
cocksurely they handle little trifles like colonial administration, the
wants of the army, municipal sewage, housing of the poor, and so forth.
Every third common need of average men is, in their mouths, a tendency
or a movement or a federation affecting the world. It never seems to
occur to 'em that the human instinct of getting as much as possible for
money paid, or, failing money, for threats and fawnings, is about as
old as Cain; and the burden of their _bat_ is: "Me an' a few mates o'
mine are going to make a new world."
As long as men only write and talk they must think that way, I suppose.
It's compensation for playing with little things. And that reminds me.
Do you know the University smile? You don't by that name, but sometimes
young civilians wear it for a very short time when they first come
out. Something--I wonder if it's our brutal chaff, or a billiard-cue,
or which?--takes it out of their faces, and when they next differ with
you they do so without smiling. But that smile flourishes in London.
I've met it again and again. It expresses tempered grief, sorrow at
your complete inability to march with the march of progress at the
Universities, and a chastened contempt. There is one man who wears it
as a garment. He is frivolously young--not more than thirty-five or
forty--and all these years no one has removed that smile. He knows
everything about everything on this earth, and above all he knows all
about men under any and every condition of life. He knows all about
the aggressive militarism of you and your friends; he isn't quite sure
of the necessity of an army; he is certain that colonial expansion
is nonsense; and he is more than certain that the whole step of all
our Empire must be regulated by the knowledge and foresight of the
workingman. Then he smiles--smiles like a seraph with an M.A. degree.
What can you do with a man like that? He has never seen an unmade road
in his life; I think he believes that wheat grows on a tree and that
beef is dug from a mine. He has never been forty miles from a railway,
and he has never been called upon to issue an order to anybody except
his well-fed servants. Isn't it wondrous? And there are battalions
and brigades of these men in town removed from the fear of want,
living until they are seventy or eighty, sheltered, fed, drained and
administered, expending their vast leisure in talking and writing.
But the real fun begins much lower down the line. I've been associating
generally and very particularly with the men who say that they are
the only men in the world who work--and they call themselves _the_
workingman. Now the workingman in America is a nice person. He says he
is a man and behaves accordingly. That is to say, he has some notion
that he is part and parcel of a great country. At least, he talks that
way. But in this town you can see thousands of men meeting publicly
on Sundays to cry aloud that everybody may hear that they are poor,
downtrodden helots--in fact, "the pore workin'man." At their clubs and
pubs the talk is the same. It's the utter want of self-respect that
revolts. My friend the tobacconist has a cousin, who is, apparently,
sound in mind and limb, aged twenty-three, clear-eyed and upstanding.
He is a "skibbo" by trade--a painter of sorts. He married at twenty,
and he has two children. He can spend three-quarters of an hour talking
about his downtrodden condition. He works under another _Raj-mistri_,
who has saved money and started a little shop of his own. He hates that
_Raj-mistri_; he loathes the police; and his views on the lives and
customs of the aristocracy are strange. He approves of every form of
lawlessness, and he knows that everybody who holds authority is sure
to be making a good thing out of it. Of himself as a citizen he never
thinks. Of himself as an Ishmael he thinks a good deal. He is entitled
to eight hours' work a day and some time off--said time to be paid for;
he is entitled to free education for his children--and he doesn't want
no bloomin' clergyman to teach 'em; he is entitled to houses especially
built for himself because he pays the bulk of the taxes of the country.
He is not going to emigrate, not he; he reserves to himself the right
of multiplying as much as he pleases; the streets must be policed for
him while he demonstrates, immediately under my window, by the way, for
ten consecutive hours, and _I_ am probably a thief because my clothes
are better than his. The proposition is a very simple one. He has no
duties to the State, no personal responsibility of any kind, and he'd
sooner see his children dead than soldiers of the Queen. The Government
owes him everything because he is a pore workin'man. When the Guards
tried their Board-school mutiny at the Wellington Barracks my friend
was jubilant. "What did I tell you?" he said. "You see the very
soldiers won't stand it."
"What's it?"
"Bein' treated like machines instead of flesh and blood. 'Course they
won't."
The popular evening paper wrote that the Guards, with perfect justice,
had rebelled against being treated like machines instead of flesh and
blood. Then I thought of a certain regiment that lay in Mian Mir for
three years and dropped four hundred men out of a thousand. It died of
fever and cholera. There were no pretty nursemaids to work with it in
the streets, because there were no streets. I saw how the Guards amused
themselves and how their sergeants smoked in uniform. I pitied the
Guards with their cruel sentry-goes, their three nights out of bed,
and their unlimited supply of love and liquor.
Another man, not a workman, told me that the Guards' riot--it's
impossible, as you know, to call this kick-up of the fatted flunkies
of the army a mutiny--was only "a schoolboy's prank"; and he could not
see that if it was what he said it was, the Guards were no regiment
and should have been wiped out decently and quietly. There again the
futility of a sheltered people cropped up. You mustn't treat a man like
a machine in this country, but you can't get any work out of a man till
he has learned to work like a machine. D---- has just come home for a
few months from the charge of a mountain battery on the frontier. He
used to begin work at eight, and he was thankful if he got off at six;
most of the time on his feet. When he went to the Black Mountain he was
extensively engaged for nearly sixteen hours a day; and that on food
at which the "pore workin'man" would have turned up his state-lifted
nose. D---- on the subject of labour as understood by the white man in
his own home is worth hearing. Though coarse--considerably coarse! But
D---- doesn't know all the hopeless misery of the business. When the
small pig, oyster, furniture, carpet, builder or general shopman works
his way out of the ruck he turns round and makes his old friends and
employes sweat. He knows how near he can go to flaying 'em alive before
they kick; and in this matter he is neither better nor worse than a
_bunnia_ or a _havildar_ of our own blessed country. It's the small
employer of labour that skins his servant, exactly as the forty-pound
householder works her one white servant to the bone and goes to drop
pennies into the plate to convert the heathen in the East.
Just at present, as you have read, the person who calls himself the
pore workin'man--the man I saw kicking fallen men in the mud by the
docks last winter--has discovered a real, fine, new original notion;
and he is working it for all he is worth. He calls it the solidarity
of labour _bundobast_; but it's caste--four thousand years old, caste
of Menu--with old _shetts_, _mahajuns_, guildtolls, excommunication
and all the rest of it. All things considered, there isn't anything
much older than caste--it began with the second generation of man on
earth--but to read the "advance" papers on the subject you'd imagine it
was a revelation from Heaven. The real fun will begin--as it has begun
and ended many times before--when the caste of skilled labour--that's
the pore workin'man--are pushed up and knocked about by the lower and
unrecognised castes, who will form castes of their own and outcaste on
the decision of their own _punchayats_. How these castes will scuffle
and fight among themselves, and how astonished the Englishman will be!