nests under the eaves. The curved moon hung on the sky as the hunter's
horn on the wall. Timid Wat--the hare--came ambling along the lane, and
almost ran against two lovers in a recess of the bushes by an elm.
Andrew, Andrew! these lips are too sweet for you; get you to your
desk--that smiling shape, those shaded, soft brown eyes, let them
alone. Be generous--do not awaken hopes you can never, never fulfil.
The new-mown hay is scented yet more sweetly in the evening--of a
summer's eve it is always too soon to go home.
The blackbirds whistled again, big Mat slew the grass from the rising
to the going down of the sun--moon-daisies, sorrel, and buttercups lay
in rows of swathe as he mowed. I wonder whether the man ever thought,
as he reposed at noontide on a couch of grass under the hedge? Did he
think that those immense muscles, that broad, rough-hewn plank of a
chest of his, those vast bones encased in sinewy limbs--being flesh in
its fulness--ought to have more of this earth than mere common men, and
still more than thin-faced people--mere people, not men--in black
coats? Did he dimly claim the rights of strength in his mind, and
arrogate to himself the prerogatives of arbitrary kings? Who knows what
big processes of reasoning, dim and big, passed through his mind in the
summer days? Did he conclude he had a right to take what others only
asked or worked for?
The sweet scent of the new-mown hay disappeared, the hay became whiter,
the ricks rose higher, and were topped and finished. Hourly the year
grew drier and sultry, as the time of wheat-harvest approached. Sap of
spring had dried away; dry stalk of high summer remained, browned with
heat. Mr. Andrew (in the country the son is always called by his
Christian name, with the prefix Master or Mr.) had been sent for to
London to fill the promised lucrative berth. The reapers were in the
corn--Dolly tying up; big Mat slashing at the yellow stalks. Why the
man worked so hard no one could imagine, unless it was for pure
physical pleasure of using those great muscles. Unless, indeed, a fire,
as it were, was burning in his mind, and drove him to labour to smother
it, as they smother fires by beating them. Dolly was happier than
ever--the gayest of the gay. She sang, she laughed, her white, gleaming
teeth shone in the sunshine; it was as if she had some secret which
enabled her to defy the taunts and cruel, shameless words hurled at
her, like clods of earth, by the other women. Gay she was, as the
brilliant poppies who, having the sun as their own, cared for nothing
else.
Till suddenly, just before the close of harvest, Dolly and Mat were
missing from the field. Of course their absence was slanderously
connected, but there was no known ground for it. Big Mat was found
intoxicated at the tavern, from which he never moved for a fortnight,
spending in one long drain of drink the lump of money his mighty arms
had torn from the sun in the burning hours of work. Dolly was ill at
home; sometimes in her room, sometimes downstairs; but ill, shaky and
weak--ague they called it. There were dark circles round her eyes, her
chin drooped to her breast; she wrapped herself in a shawl in all the
heat. It was some time before even the necessity of working brought her
forth again, and then her manner was hurried and furtive; she would
begin trembling all of a minute, and her eyes filled quickly.
By degrees the autumn advanced, and the rooks followed the ploughman.
Dolly gradually recovered something of her physical buoyancy; her
former light-heartedness never returned. Sometimes an incident would
cause a flash of the old gaiety, only for her to sink back into subdued
quietness. The change was most noticeable in her eyes; soft and tender
still, brown and velvety, there was a deep sadness in them--the longer
she looked at you, the more it was visible. They seemed as if her
spirit had suffered some great wrong; too great for redress, and that
could only be borne in silence.
How beautiful are beautiful eyes! Not from one aspect only, as a
picture is, where the light falls rightly on it--the painter's point of
view--they vary to every and any aspect. The orb rolls to meet the
changing circumstance, and is adjusted to all. But a little inquiry
into the mechanism of the eyes will indicate how wondrously they are
formed. Science has dispelled many illusions, broken many dreams; but
here, in the investigation of the eye, it has added to our marvelling
interest. The eye is still like the work of a magician: it is
physically divine. Besides the liquid flesh which delights the
beholder, there is then the retina, the mysterious nerve which receives
a thousand pictures on one surface and confuses none; and further, the
mystery of the brain, which reproduces them at will, twenty years, yes
threescore years and ten, afterwards. Perhaps of all physical things,
the eye is most beautiful, most divine.
Her eyes were still beautiful, but subdued and full of a great wrong.
What that wrong was became apparent in the course of time. Dolly had to
live with Mat, and, unhappily, not as his wife. Next harvest there was
a child wrapped in a red shawl with her in the field, placed under the
shocks while she worked. Her brother Bill talked and threatened--of
what avail was it? The law gave no redress, and among men in these
things, force is master still. There were none who could meet big Mat
in fight.
Something seemed to burn in Mat like fire. Now he worked, and now he
drank, but the drink which would have killed another did him no injury.
He grew and flourished upon it, more bone, more muscle, more of the
savage nature of original man. But there was something within on fire.
Was he not satisfied even yet? Did he arrogate yet further prerogatives
of kings?--prerogatives which even kings claim no longer. One day,
while in drink, his heavy fist descended--he forgot his might; he did
not check it, like Ulysses in the battle with Irus--and Dolly fell.
When they lifted her up, one eye was gone.
It was utterly put out, organically destroyed; no skill, no money, no
loving care could restore it. The soft, brown velvet, the laugh, the
tear gone for ever. The divine eye was broken--battered as a stone
might be. The exquisite structure which reflected the trees and
flowers, and took to itself the colour of the summer sky, was shapeless.
In the second year, Mr. Andrew came down, and one day met her in the
village. He did not know her. The stoop, the dress which clothed, but
responded to no curve, the sunken breast, and the sightless eye, how
should he recognise these? This ragged, plain, this ugly, repellent
creature--he did not know her. She spoke; Mr. Andrew hastily fumbled in
his pocket, fetched out half-a-crown, gave it, and passed on quickly.
How fortunate that he had not entangled himself!
Meantime, Mat drank and worked harder than ever, and became more
morose, so that no one dared cross him, yet as a worker he was trusted
by the farmer. Whatever it was, the fire in him burned deeper, and to
the very quick. The poppies came and went once more, the harvest moon
rose yellow and ruddy, all the joy of the year proceeded, but Dolly was
like a violet over which a waggon-wheel had rolled. The thorn had gone
deep into her bosom.
II
RURAL DYNAMITE
In the cold North men eat bread of fir-bark; in our own fields the
mouse, if pressed for food in winter, will gnaw the bark of sapling
trees. Frost sharpens the teeth like a file, and hunger is keener than
frost. If any one used to more fertile scenes had walked across the
barren meads Mr. Roberts rented as the summer declined, he would have
said that a living could only be gained from them as the mouse gains it
in frost-time. By sharp-set nibbling and paring; by the keenest
frost-bitten meanness of living; by scraping a little bit here, and
saving another trifle yonder, a farmer might possibly get through the
year. At the end of each year he would be rather worse off than before,
descending a step annually. He must nibble like a frost-driven mouse to
merely exist. So poor was the soil, that the clay came to the surface,
and in wet weather a slip of the foot exposed it--the heel cut through
the veneer of turf into the cold, dead, moist clay. Nothing grew but
rushes. Every time a horse moved over the marshy land his hoof left
deep holes which never again filled up, but remained the year through,
now puddles, full of rain water, and now dry holes. The rain made the
ground a swamp; the sun cracked it as it does paint. Who could pay rent
for such a place?--for rushes, flags, and water.
Yet it was said, with whisper and nod, that the tenant, Mr. Roberts,
was a warm man as warm men go after several years of bad seasons,
falling prices, and troubles of all kinds. For one thing, he hopped,
and it is noted among country folk, that, if a man hops, he generally
accumulates money. Mr. Roberts hopped, or rather dragged his legs from
rheumatics contracted in thirty years' hardest of hard labour on that
thankless farm. Never did any man labour so continually as he, from the
earliest winter dawn when the blackbird, with puffed feathers, still
tried to slumber in the thornbush, but could not for cold, on till the
latest summer eve, after the white barn owl had passed round the fir
copse. Both with his hands, and with his eyes, now working, now
watching, the man ceased not, and such was his dogged pertinacity that,
like the mouse, he won a living. He did more, he saved. At what price?
At the price of a fireless life: I mean without cheer, by denial of
everything which renders human life superior to that of the rabbit in
his burrow. No wife, no children, no niece, or any woman to see to his
comforts; no comfort and no pleasure; a bare house and rheumatism.
Bill, his principal labourer, Dolly's brother, slept with him in the
same bed, master and man, a custom common in old times, long since
generally disused.
Yet Mr. Roberts was not without some humanism, if such a word may be
used; certainly he never gave away a penny, but as certainly he cheated
no man. He was upright in conduct, and not unpleasant in manner. He
could not have been utterly crabbed for this one labourer, Bill, to
stay with him five-and-twenty years. This was the six-and-twentieth
year they had dwelt there together in the gaunt, grey, lonely house,
with woods around them, isolated from the world, and without a hearth.
A hearth is no hearth unless a woman sit by it. This six-and-twentieth
year, the season then just ended, had been the worst of the series;
rain had spoiled the hay, increased the payment of wages by lengthening
the time of hay-making; ruin, he declared, stared him in the face; he
supposed at last he must leave the tenancy. And now the harvest was
done, the ricks thatched with flags from the marsh (to save straw), the
partridges were dispersed, the sportsmen having broken up the coveys,
the black swifts had departed--they built every year in the grey stone
slates on the lonely house--and nothing was left to be done but to tend
the cattle morning and evening, to reflect on the losses, and to talk
ceaselessly of the new terror which hung over the whole district.
It was rick-burning. Probably, gentlemen in London, who "sit at home at
ease," imagine rick-burning a thing of the past, impossible since
insurance robbed the incendiary of his sting, unheard of and extinct.
Nothing of the kind. That it is not general is true, still to this day
it breaks out in places, and rages with vehemence, placing the
countryside under a reign of terror. The thing seems inexplicable, but
it is a fact; the burning of ricks and farm-sheds every now and then,
in certain localities, reaches the dimensions of a public disaster.
One night from the garret window, Mr. Roberts, and Bill, his man,
counted five fires visible at once. One was in full sight, not a mile
distant, two behind the wood, above which rose the red glow, the other
two dimly illumined the horizon on the left like a rising moon. While
they watched in the dark garret the rats scampered behind them, and a
white barn owl floated silently by. They counted up fourteen fires that
had taken place since the beginning of the month, and now there were
five together. Mr. Roberts did not sleep that night. Being so near the
woods and preserves it was part of the understanding that he should not
keep a gun--he took a stout staff, and went out to his hayricks, and
there stayed till daylight. By ten o'clock he was trudging into the
town; his mind had been half-crazed with anxiety for his ricks; he was
not insured, he had never insured, just to save the few shillings it
cost, such was the nibbling by which he lived. He had struggled hard
and kept the secret to himself--of the non-insurance--he foresaw that
if known he should immediately suffer. But at the town the insurance
agent demurred to issue a policy. The losses had been so heavy, there
was no knowing how much farther the loss might extend, for not the
slightest trace of the incendiary had yet been discovered,
notwithstanding the reward offered, and this was a new policy. Had it
been to add to an old one, had Mr. Roberts insured in previous years,
it would have been different. He could not do it on his own
responsibility, he must communicate with the head office; most likely
they would do it, but he must have their authority. By return of post
he should know. Mr. Roberts trudged home again, with the misery of two
more nights confronting him; two more nights of exposure to the chance
of utter ruin. If those ricks were burned, the savings--the nibblings
of his life--were gone. This intense, frost-bitten economy, by which
alone he had been able to prosper, now threatened to overwhelm him with
destruction.
There is nothing that burns so resolutely as a hayrick; nothing that
catches fire so easily. Children are playing with matches; one holds
the ignited match till, it scorches the fingers, and then drops it. The
expiring flame touches three blades of dry grass, of hay fallen from
the rick, these flare immediately; the flame runs along like a train of
gun-powder, rushes up the side of the rick, singeing it as a horse's
coat is singed, takes the straw of the thatch which blackens into a
hole, cuts its way through, the draught lifts it up the slope of the
thatch, and in five minutes the rick is on fire irrecoverably. Unless
beaten out at the first start, it is certain to go on. A spark from a
pipe, dropped from the mouth of a sleeping man, will do it. Once well
alight, and the engines may come at full speed, one five miles, one
eight, two ten; they may pump the pond dry, and lay hose to the distant
brook--it is in vain. The spread of the flames may be arrested, but not
all the water that can be thrown will put out the rick. The outside of
the rick where the water strikes it turns black, and dense smoke
arises, but the inside core continues to burn till the last piece is
charred. All that can be done is to hastily cut away that side of the
rick--if any remains--yet untouched, and carry it bodily away. A
hayrick will burn for hours, one huge mass of concentrated, glowing,
solid fire, not much flame, but glowing coals, so that the farmer may
fully understand, may watch and study and fully comprehend the extent
of his loss. It burns itself from a square to a dome, and the red dome
grows gradually smaller till its lowest layer of ashes strews the
ground. It burns itself as it were in blocks: the rick was really
homogeneous; it looks while aglow as if it had been constructed of
large bricks or blocks of hay. These now blackened blocks dry and
crumble one by one till the dome sinks. Under foot the earth is heated,
so intense is the fire; no one can approach, even on the windward side,
within a pole's length. A widening stream of dense white smoke flows
away upwards, flecked with great sparks, blackening the elms, and
carrying flakes of burning hay over outhouses, sheds, and farmsteads.
Thus from the clouds, as it seems, drops further destruction. Nothing
in the line of the wind is safe. Fine impalpable ashes drift and fall
like rain half a mile away. Sometimes they remain suspended in the air
for hours, and come down presently when the fire is out, like volcanic
dust drifting from the crater. This dust lies soft and silky on the
hand. By the burning rick, the air rushing to the furnace roars aloud,
coming so swiftly as to be cold; on one side intense heat, on the other
cold wind. The pump, pump, swing, swing of the manual engines; the
quick, short pant of the steam fire-engine; the stream and hiss of the
water; shouts and answers; gleaming brass helmets; frightened birds;
crowds of white faces, whose frames are in shadow; a red glow on the
black, wet mud of the empty pond; rosy light on the walls of the
homestead, crossed with vast magnified shadows; windows glistening; men
dragging sail-like tarpaulins and rick cloths to cover the sheds;
constables upright and quiet, but watchful, standing at intervals to
keep order; if by day, the strangest mixture of perfect calm and heated
anxiety, the smoke bluish, the floating flakes visible as black specks,
the flames tawny, pigeons fluttering round, cows grazing in idol-like
indifference to human fears. Ultimately, rows of flattened and roughly
circular layers of blackened ashes, whose traces remain for months.
This is dynamite in the hands of the village ruffian.
This hay, or wheat, or barley, not only represents money; it represents
the work of an entire year, the sunshine of a whole summer; it is the
outcome of man's thought and patient labour, and it is the food of the
helpless cattle. Besides the hay, there often go with it buildings,
implements, waggons, and occasionally horses are suffocated. Once now
and then the farmstead goes.
Now, has not the farmer, even if covered by insurance, good reason to
dread this horrible incendiarism? It is a blow at his moral existence
as well as at his pecuniary interests. Hardened indeed must be that
heart that could look at the old familiar scene, blackened, fire-spilt,
trodden, and blotted, without an inward desolation. Boxes and barrels
of merchandise in warehouses can be replaced, but money does not
replace the growth of nature.
Hence the brutality of it--the blow at a man's heart. His hay, his
wheat, his cattle, are to a farmer part of his life; coin will not
replace them. Nor does the incendiary care if the man himself, his
house, home, and all perish at the same time. It is dynamite in despite
of insurance. The new system of silos--burying the grass when cut at
once in its green state, in artificial caves--may much reduce the risk
of fire if it comes into general use.
These fire invasions almost always come in the form of an epidemic; not
one but three, five, ten, fifteen fires follow in quick succession.
Sometimes they last through an entire winter, though often known to
take place in summer, directly after harvest.
Rarely does detection happen; to this day half these incendiary fires
are never followed by punishment. Yet it is noted that they generally
occur within a certain radius; they are all within six, or seven, or
eight miles, being about the distance that a man or two bent on evil
could compass in the night time. But it is not always night; numerous
fires are started in broad daylight. Stress of winter weather, little
food, and clothing, and less fuel at home have been put forward as
causes of a chill desperation, ending in crime. On the contrary, these
fires frequently occur when labourers' pockets are full, just after
they have received their harvest wages. Bread is not at famine prices;
hard masters are not specially selected for the gratification of spite;
good masters suffer equally. What then is the cause?
There is none but that bitter, bitter feeling which I venture to call
the dynamite disposition, and which is found in every part of the
civilised world; in Germany, Italy, France, and our own mildly ruled
England. A brooding, morose, concentrated hatred of those who possess
any kind of substance or comfort; landlord, farmer, every one. An
unsparing vendetta, a merciless shark-like thirst of destructive
vengeance; a monomania of battering, smashing, crushing, such as seizes
the Lancashire weaver, who kicks his woman's brains out without any
special reason for dislike, mingled with and made more terrible by this
unchangeable hostility to property and those who own it. No creed, no
high moral hopes of the rights of man and social regeneration, no true
sans culottism even, nothing at all but set teeth and inflated
nostrils; blow up, burn, smash, annihilate! A disposition or character
which is not imaginary but a fact, as proved abundantly by the placing
of rails and iron chairs on lines to upset trains, by the dynamite
explosions at Government offices, railway stations, and even at
newspaper offices, the sending of letters filled with explosives,
firing dynamite in trout streams just to destroy the harmless fish; a
character which in the country has hitherto manifested itself in the
burning of ricks and farm buildings. Science is always putting fresh
power into the hands of this class. In cities they have partly awakened
to the power of knowledge; in the country they still use the match. If
any one thinks that there is no danger in England because there are no
deep-seated causes of discontent, such as foreign rule, oppressive
enactments, or conscription, I can assure him that he is wofully
mistaken. This class needs no cause at all; prosperity cannot allay its
hatred, and adversity does not weaken it. It is certainly unwise to the
last degree to provoke this demon, to control which as yet no means
have been found. You cannot arrest the invisible; you cannot pour
Martini-Henry bullets into a phantom. How are you going to capture
people who blow themselves into atoms in order to shatter the frame of
a Czar?
In its dealings with the lower class this generation is certainly far
from wise. Never was the distinction so sharp between the poor--the
sullen poor who stand scornful and desperate at the street corners--and
the well-to-do. The contrast now extends to every one who can afford a
black coat. It is not confined to the millionaire. The contrast is with
every black coat. Those who only see the drawing-room side of society,
those who move, too, in the well-oiled atmosphere of commercial
offices, are quite ignorant of the savage animosity which watches them
to and fro the office or the drawing-room from the street corner.
Question it is if any mediaeval soldiery bursting abroad in Sinigaglia
were so brutal as is the street rough, that blot and hideous product of
modern civilisation. How easy it is to point to the sobriety and the
good sense of the working class and smile in assumed complacency! What
have the sober mass of the working class to do with it? No more than
you or I, or the Rothschilds, or dukes of blood royal. There the thing
is, and it requires no great sagacity to see that the present mode of
dealing with it is a failure and likely to be worse. If you have
gunpowder, you should not put it under hydraulic pressure. You should
not stir it up and hold matches to it to see if it is there. That is
what prosecutions and imprisonments on charges of atheism and so on do.
It is stirring up the powder and trying it with a match.
Nor should you put it under hydraulic pressure, which is now being done
all over the country, under the new laws which force every wretch who
enters a workhouse for a night's shelter to stay there two nights;
under the cold-blooded cruelty which, in the guise of science, takes
the miserable quarter of a pint of ale from the lips of the palsied and
decrepit inmates; which puts the imbecile--even the guiltless
imbecile--on what is practically bread and water. Words fail me to
express the cruelty and inhumanity of this crazed legislation.