flunkey, serving mortal masters; he served a nobler one than they--the
great god Opportunity. But it was not safe to tell him this, for though
there was no reason in the world why he should dislike its being known
that he acted in accordance with his nature, somehow he did not like it.
This was, no doubt, an instance of his care.
Hardly any social measure could be brought to his attention with which
he did not feel a certain meed of sympathy. If, for instance, somebody
proposed a scheme of Old-Age Pensions, he would give a careful nod, and
wait, because he knew that when somebody got up and said that this was
dangerous, he should agree with him; or, again, if it were suggested
that children should be made less hungry out of the public rates, he
approved, but not too much, because he felt that to approve too much
would interfere with his approval of the plan that they should not be
fed out of the public rates. “A little bit of both,” would be his
thought, and by this masterly decision, which was often called his
commonsense, he infallibly secured possession to the children of a
little bit of neither; but, as he very justly said, to grant the first
was too progressive; to grant the second, retrograde. And so with every
other measure.
His leaders on both sides had learned from long experience the
daintiness of his digestion; how very sensitive it was to motion; how,
if jolted, it revolted; and so they did not try too hard to jolt it now,
for they naturally hated to be cast into the air. They appreciated, too,
his sterling worth--without him they felt the country would improve too
fast.
And those leaders of his would look at him. With his eyelids lowered,
but his eyes a little anxious, with his lips pinched in, and yet
half-smiling, in an overcoat of medium weight, put on or taken off
according to the weather, he sat, not very often opening his mouth.
Behind his grey and unobtrusive figure they saw the masses of grey,
unobtrusive, careful men, and a little shiver would run down their
spines.
Too often had they awakened from their dreams and seen him sitting
there, under a tall grey tower with a clock that faced all ways, bench
upon bench, row after row, by day, by night, one eye of him on one side,
and one eye on the other, and his nose between them in the middle.
FEAR
V
FEAR
I saw him first on a spring day--one of those days when the limbs are
lazy with delicious tiredness, the air soft and warm against the face,
the heart full of a queer longing to know the hearts of other men.
He was quite a little man, with broad, high shoulders, and hardly any
neck; and what was noticeable in his square, wooden-looking figure,
dressed in light, shabby tweed, and patched, yellow boots, was that he
seemed to have no chest. He was flat--from his white face, with its
sandy hair, moustache, and eyebrows, under an old, narrow-brimmed straw
hat, right down to his feet. It was as though life had planed him. His
face, too, seemed to have lost all but its bones and skin of
yellow-white; there were no eyelashes to his reddish-brown round eyes;
there was no colour in his thin lips, compressed as though to keep the
secret of a mortal fear. Save for the wheeze and rustle of his
breathing, he stood very still, nervously rubbing his claw-like hands up
and down his trouser-legs. His voice was hoarse and faint.
“Yes, I was a baker,” he said. “They tell me as how that’s where I’ve
done myself the harm. But I never learnt another trade; I was afraid
that if I give it up I wouldn’t get no other work. Bakin’s not good
for----”
He laid his thin, yellow fingers where there was so little left to lay
them on.
“There’s my wife and child,” he went on in his matter-of-fact voice;
“I’m fair frightened. If I could give up thinking of what’s coming to
them, I believe that I’d feel better. But what am I to do? All my
savin’s have gone now; I’m selling off my things, an’ when I’m through
with that--there we shall be.”
His unlovely little face, with its hard-bitten lips and lashless eyes,
quivered all over suddenly, as though within him all his fear had risen
up, seized on his features, and set them to a dance of agony; but they
were soon still again. Stillness was the only possible condition for a
face covering such thoughts as he had had.
“I don’t sleep for thinkin’ of it--that’s against me!”
Yes--that was against him, considering the condition of his health. Any
doctor would have told him to sleep well; that sleep, in fact, was quite
essential. And I seemed to see him lying on his back, staring at the
darkness, with those lashless, red-rimmed eyes, trying to find in its
black depths something that was not there--the wan glow of a livelihood
of some kind for his wife and child.
“I gets in such a muck o’ sweat, worrying about what’s going to come to
them with me like this; it quite exhausts me, it does really. You
wouldn’t believe how weak I was!”
And one could not help reminding him that he ought not to worry--it was
very bad for him.
“Yes, I know that; I don’t think I can last long at this rate.”
“If you could give up worrying, you would get well much quicker!”
He answered by a look of such humble and unconscious irony as one may
see on the faces of the dead before their last wonder at the end has
faded from them.
“They tells me up at the hospital to eat well!”
And, looking at this meagre little man, it seemed that the advice was
sound. Good food, and plenty of it!
“I’ve been doing the best I can, of course.” He made this statement
without sarcasm, in a voice that seemed to say: “This world I live in
is, of course, a funny world; the sort of fun it likes may be
first-rate, but if I were once to begin to laugh at it, where could I
stop--I ask you--where?”
“Plenty of milk they tell me is the best thing I can take, but the child
she’s bound to have as much as we can manage to buy. At her age, you
see, she needs it. Of course, if I could get a job!--I’d take
anything--I’d drive a baker’s cart!”
He lifted his little pipes of arms, and let them fall again, and God
knows what he meant by such a motion, unless it were to show his
strength.
“Of course, some days,” he said, “I can hardly get my breath at all, and
that’s against me.”
It would be, as he said, against him; and, encouraged by a look, he
added:
“I know I kep’ on too long with my profession; but you know what it
is--when you’ve been brought up to a job you get to depend on it; to
give it up is like chuckin’ of yourself away. And that’s what I’ve
found--people don’t want such as I am now.”
And for a full half-minute we stood looking at each other; his bitten,
discoloured lips twitched twice, and a faint pink warmed the paper
whiteness of his cheeks.
“Up at the hospital they don’t seem to take no interest in my case any
more; seems as if they thought it ’opeless.”
Unconscious that he had gone beneath the depths of human nature, shown
up the human passion for definite success, illustrated human worship of
the idol strength, and human scorn for what is weak--he said these
simple words in an almost injured tone. Recovery might be impossible,
people did not want such as he was now; but he was still interested in
himself, still loth to find himself a useless bee ejected from the hive.
His lashless eyes seemed saying: “I believe I could get well--I do
believe I could!”
Yet he was not unreasonable, for he went on:
“When I first went there they took a lot of interest in me--but that’s a
year ago. Perhaps I’ve disappointed them!”
Perhaps he had!
“They kept on telling me to take plenty of fresh air. Where I live, of
course, there’s not so very much about, but I take all I can. Not bein’
able to get a job, I’ve been sitting in the Park. I take the child--they
tell me not to have her too near me in the house.”
And I had a vision of this man of leisure sitting in the Park, rubbing
his hand stealthily to keep them dry, and watching with red eyes the
other men of leisure; too preoccupied to wonder even why his leisure was
not like theirs.
“Days like this,” he said, “it’s warm enough; but I can’t enjoy them for
thinking of what’s coming.”
His glance wandered to the pear-trees in the garden--they were all in
blossom, and lighted by the sun; he looked down again a little hastily.
A blackbird sang beyond the further wall. The little baker passed his
tongue over his lips.
“I’m a countryman by birth,” he said: “it’s like the country here. If I
could get a job down in the country I should pick up, perhaps. Last time
I was in the country I put on ’alf a stone. But who’d take me?”
Again he raised his little pipes of arms; this time it was clearly not
to show his strength. No--he seemed to say: “No one would take me! I
have found that out--I have found out all there is to know. I am done
for!”
“That’s about where it is,” he said; “and I wouldn’t care so much, but
for the baby and my wife. I don’t see what I could ha’ done, other than
what I have done. God knows I kept on at it till I couldn’t keep on no
longer.”
And as though he knew that he was again near that point when a hundred
times he had broken into private agony, seen by no creature but himself,
he stared hard at me, and his red moustache bristled over his sunken,
indrawn lips.
A pigeon flew across; settling on a tree in the next garden it began to
call its mate; and suddenly there came into my mind the memory of a
thrush that, some months before, had come to the garden bed where we
were standing, and all day long would hide and hop there, avoiding other
birds, with its feathers all staring and puffed out. I remembered how it
would let us take it up, and the film that kept falling on its eyes, and
its sick heart beating so faintly beneath our hands; no bird of all the
other birds came near it--knowing that it could no longer peck its
living, and was going to die.
One day we could not find it; the next day we found it under a bush,
dead.
“I suppose it’s human nature not to take me on, seein’ the state I’m
in,” the little baker said. “I don’t want to be a trouble to no one, I’m
sure; I’ve always kept myself, ever since I was that high,” he put his
hand out level with his waist; “and now I can’t keep myself, let alone
the wife and child. It’s the coming to the end of everything--it’s the
seeing of it coming. Fear--that’s what it is! But I suppose I’m not the
only one.”
And for that moment he seemed comforted by this thought that there were
thousands of other working creatures, on whose shoulders sat the
grinning cat of mortal illness, all staring with him at utter
emptiness--thousands of other working creatures who were dying because
fear had made them work too long. His face brightened ever so little, as
though the sun had found a way to him. But suddenly that wooden look,
the only safe and perfect look, came back to his features. One could
have sworn that fear had never touched him, so expressionless, so still
was he!
FASHION
VI
FASHION
I have watched you this ten minutes, while your carriage has been
standing still, and have seen your smiling face change twice, as though
you were about to say; “I am not accustomed to be stopped like this”;
but what I have chiefly noticed is that you have not looked at anything
except the persons sitting opposite and the backs of your flunkeys on
the box. Clearly nothing has distracted you from following your thought:
“There is pleasure before me, I am told!” Yours is the three-hundredth
carriage in this row that blocks the road for half a mile. In the two
hundred and ninety-nine that come before it, and the four hundred that
come after, you are sitting too--with your face before you, and your
unseeing eyes.
Resented while you gathered being; brought into the world with the most
distinguished skill; remembered by your mother when the whim came to
her; taught to believe that life consists in caring for your clean,
well-nourished body, and your manner that nothing usual can disturb;
taught to regard Society as the little ring of men and women that you
see, and to feel your only business is to know the next thing that you
want and get it given you--_You have never had a chance!_
You take commands from no other creature; your heart gives you your
commands, forms your desires, your wishes, your opinions, and passes
them between your lips. From your heart well-up the springs that feed
the river of your conduct; but your heart is a stagnant pool that has
never seen the sun. Each year when April comes, and the earth smells
new, you have an odd aching underneath your corsets. What is it for? You
have a husband, or a lover, or both, or neither, whichever suits you
best; you have children, or could have them if you wished for them; you
are fed at stated intervals with food and wine; you have all you want of
country life and country sports; you have the theatre and the opera,
books, music, and religion! From the top of the plume, torn from a dying
bird, or the flowers, made at an insufficient wage, that decorate your
head, to the sole of the shoe that cramps your foot, you are decked out
with solemn care; a year of labour has been sewn into your garments and
forged into your rings--you are a breathing triumph!
You live in the centre of the centre of the world; if you wish you can
have access to everything that has been thought since the world of
thought began; if you wish you can see everything that has ever been
produced, for you can travel where you like; you are within reach of
Nature’s grandest forms and the most perfect works of art. You can hear
the last word that is said on everything, if you wish. When you do wish,
the latest tastes are servants of your palate, the latest scents attend
your nose--_You have never had a chance!_
For, sitting there in your seven hundred carriages, you are blind--in
heart, and soul, and voice, and walk; the blindest creature in the
world. Never for one minute of your life have you thought, or done, or
spoken for yourself. You have been prevented; and so wonderful is this
plot to keep you blind that you have not a notion it exists. To yourself
your sight seems good, such is your pleasant thought. Since you cannot
even see this hedge around you, how can there be anything the other
side? The ache beneath your corsets in the spring is all you are ever to
know of what there is beyond. And no one is to blame for this--you least
of all.
It was settled, long before the well-fed dullard’s kiss from which you
sprang. Forces have worked, in dim, inexorable progress, from the
remotest time till they have bred you, little blind creature, to be the
masterpiece of their creation. With the wondrous subtlety of Fate’s
selection, they have paired and paired all that most narrowly approaches
to the mean, all that by nature shirks the risks of living, all that by
essence clings to custom, till they have secured a state of things which
has assured your coming, in your perfection of nonentity. They have
planted you apart in your expensive mould, and still they are at
work--these gardeners never idle--pruning and tying night and day to
prevent your running wild. The Forces are proud of you--their waxen,
scentless flower!
The sun beats down, and still your carriage does not move; and this
delay is getting on your nerves. You cannot imagine what is blocking-up
your way! Do you ever imagine anything? If all those goodly coverings
that contain you could be taken off, what should we find within the last
and inmost shell--a little soul that has lost its power of speculation.
A soul that was born in you a bird and has become a creeping thing;
wings gone, eyes gone, groping, and clawing with its tentacles what is
given it.
You stand up, speaking to your coachman! And you are charming, standing
there, to us who, like your footman, cannot see the label “Blind.” The
cut of your gown is perfect, the dressing of your hair the latest, the
trimming of your hat is later still; your trick of speech the very
thing; you droop your eyelids to the life; you have not too much powder;
it is a lesson in grace to see you hold your parasol. The doll of
Nature! So, since you were born; so, until you die! And, with his
turned, clean-shaven face, your footman seems to say: “Madam, how you
have come to be it is not my province to inquire. You are! I am myself
dependent on you!” You are the heroine of the farce, but no one smiles
at you, for you are tragic, the most tragic figure in the world. No
fault of yours that ears and eyes and heart and voice are atrophied so
that you have no longer spirit of your own!
Fashion brought you forth, and she has seen to it that you are the image
of your mother, knowing that if she made you by a hair’s-breadth
different, you would see what she is like and judge her. You are
Fashion, Fashion herself, blind, fear-full Fashion! You do what you do
because others do it; think what you think because others think it; feel
what you feel because others feel it. You are the Figure without eyes.
And no one can reach you, no one can alter you, poor little bundle of
others’ thoughts; for there is nothing left to reach.
In your seven hundred carriages, you pass; and the road is bright with
you. Above that road, below it, and on either hand, are the million
things and beings that you cannot see; all that is organic in the world,
all that is living and creating, all that is striving to be free. You
pass, glittering, on your round, the sightless captive of your own
triumph; and the eyes of the hollow-chested work-girls on the pavement
fix on you a thousand eager looks, for you are strange to them. Many of
their hearts are sore with envy; they do not know that you are as dead
as snow around a crater; they cannot tell you for the nothing that you
are--Fashion! The Figure without eyes!
SPORT
VII
SPORT
Often in the ride of some Scotch wood I used to stand, clutching my gun,
with eyes moving from right to left, from left to right. Every nerve and
fibre of my body would receive and answer to the slightest movements,
the smallest noises, the faintest scents. The acrid sweetness of the
spruce-trees in the mist, the bite of innumerable midges, the feel of
the deep, wet, mossy heather underfoot, the brown-grey twilight of the
wood, the stillness--these were poignant as they never will be again.
And slowly, back of that stillness, the noises of the beaters would
begin. Gentle and regular, at first--like the ending of a symphony
rather than its birth--they would swell, then drop and fade away
completely. In that unexpected silence a squirrel scurried out along a
branch, sat a moment looking, and scurried back; or, with its soft,
blunt flight, an owl would fly across.
Then, with a shrill, far “Mar-r-rk!” the beaters’ chorus would rise
again, drowned for an instant by the crack of the keepers’ guns; louder
and louder it came, rhythmically, inexorably nearer. In the ride little
shivers of wind shook the drops of warm mist off the needles of the
spruce, and a half-veiled sun faintly warmed and coloured everything.
Stealing through heather and fern would come a rabbit, confiding in the
space before him and the ride where he was wont to sun himself. At a
shot he flung his mortal somersault, or disappeared into a burrow,
reached too soon. To see him lie there dead in the brown-grey twilight
of the trees would give one a strange pleasure--a feeling such as some
casual love affair will give a man, the pleasure of a primitive virility
expressed--but to watch him disappear into the earth would irritate, for
he had got his death, and, dead within the earth, he would not do one
any sort of credit. Nor was it nice to think that he was dying slowly,
so one forbore to think.
Sometimes we did not shoot at such small stuff, but waited for the
roedeer. These dun familiars of the wood were very shy, clinging to the
deepest thickets, treading with gentle steps, invisible as spirits, and
ever trying to break back. Now and then, leaping forward with
hindquarters higher than its shoulders, one of them would face the line
of beaters, and then would arise the strangest noises above the
customary sounds and tappings--cries of fierce resentment that such fine
“game” should thus escape the guns. When the creature crossed the line
these cries swelled into a long, continuous, excited shriek; and, as the
yells died out in muttering, I used to feel a hollow sense of
disappointment.
When the beat was over they would collect the birds and beasts which had
fulfilled their destiny, and place them all together. Half hidden by the
bracken or deep heather the little bodies lay abandoned to the ground
with the wonderful strange limpness of dead things. We stood looking at
them in the misty air, acrid with the fragrance of the spruce-trees; and
each of us would feel a vague strange thirst, a longing to be again
standing in the rides with the cries of the beaters in our ears, and
creatures coming closer, closer to our guns.
* * * * *
Often in the police-courts I have sat, while they drove another kind of
“game.”
It would be quiet in there but for the whisperings and shufflings
peculiar to all courts of law. Through the high-placed windows a grey
light fell impartially, and in it everything looked hard and shabby. The
air smelled of old clothes, and now and then, when the women were
brought in, of the corpse of some sweet scent.
Through a door on the left-hand side they would drive these women, one
by one, often five or six, even a dozen, in one morning. Some of them
would come shuffling forward to the dock with their heads down; others
walked boldly; some looked as if they must faint; some were hard and
stoical as stone. They would be dressed in black, quite neatly; or in
cheap, rumpled finery; or in skimped, mud-stained garments. Their faces
were of every type--dark and short, with high cheek-bones; blowsy from
drink; long, worn, and raddled; one here and there like a wild fruit;
and many bestially insensible, devoid of any sort of beauty.
They stood, as in southern countries, one may see many mules or asses,
harnessed to too-heavy loads of wood or stone, stand, utterly unmoving,
with a mute submissive viciousness. Now and then a girl would turn half
round towards the public, her lips smiling defiantly, but her eyes never
resting for a moment, as though knowing well enough there was no place
where they _could_ rest. The next to her would seem smitten with a sort
of deathlike shame, but there were not many of this kind, for they were
those whom the beaters had driven in for the first time. Sometimes they
refused to speak. As a rule they gave their answers in hard voices,
their sullen eyes lowered; then, having received the meed of justice,
went shuffling or flaunting out.