of sport growing more frequent with each year that intervened between
their present and that moment when some sportsman first caught sight of
them and started out to bring them down. From most of them that day was
now distant by many thousand miles of pavement, so far off that it was
hard work to remember it. What sport they had afforded since! Yet not
one of all their faces seemed to show that they saw the fun that lay in
their being driven in like this. They were perhaps still grateful, some
of them, at the bottom of their hearts for that first moment when they
came shyly towards the hunter, who stood holding his breath for fear
they should not come; unable from their natures to believe that it was
not their business to attract and afford them sport. But suddenly in a
pair of greenish eyes and full lips sharpened at their corners, behind
the fading paint and powder on a face, one could see the huntress--the
soul as of a stealing cat, waiting to flesh its claws in what it could,
driven by some deep, insatiable instinct. This one too had known sport;
she had loved to spring and bring down the prey just as we who brought
her here had loved to hunt her. Nature had put sport into her heart and
into ours; and behind that bold or cringing face there seemed to lurk
this question: “I only did what you do--what nearly every man of you has
done a little, in your time. I only wanted a bit of sport, like you:
that’s human nature, isn’t it? Why do you bring me here, when you don’t
bring yourselves! Why do you allow me in certain bounds to give you
sport, and trap me outside those bounds like vermin? When I was
beautiful--and I _was_ beautiful--it was you who begged of me! I gave
until my looks were gone. Now that my looks are gone, I have to beg you
to come to me, or I must starve; and when I beg, you bring me here.
That’s funny isn’t it, d----d funny! I’d laugh, if laughter earned my
living; but I can’t afford to laugh, my fellow-sportsmen--the more there
are of you the better for me until I’m done for!”
Silently we men would watch--as one may watch rats let out of a cage to
be pounced upon by a terrier--their frightened, restless eyes cowed by
coming death; their short, frantic rush, soon ended; their tossed, limp
bodies! On some of our faces was a jeering curiosity, as though we were
saying: “Ah! we thought that you would come to this.” A few faces--not
used to such a show--were darkened with a kind of pity. The most were
fixed and hard and dull, as of men looking at hurtful things they own
and cannot do without. But in all our unmoving eyes could be seen that
tightening of fibre, that tenseness, which is the mark of sport. The
beaters had well done their work; the game was driven to the gun!
It was but the finish of the hunt, the hunt that we had started, one or
other of us, some fine day, the sun shining and the blood hot, wishing
no harm to any one, but just a little sport.
MONEY
VIII
MONEY
Every night between the hours of two and four he would wake, and lie
sleepless, and all his monetary ghosts would come and visit him. If, for
instance, he had just bought a house and paid for it, any doubt he had
conceived at any time about its antecedents or its future would suddenly
appear, squatting on the foot-rail of his bed, staring in his face.
There it would grow, until it seemed to fill the room; and terror would
grip his heart. The words: “I shall lose my money,” would leap to his
lips; but in the dark it seemed ridiculous to speak them. Presently
beside that doubt more doubts would squat. Doubts about his other
houses, about his shares; misgivings as to Water Boards; terrors over
Yankee Rails. They took, fantastically, the shape of owls, clinging in
a line and swaying, while from their wide black gaps of mouth would come
the silent chorus: “Money, money, you’ll lose all your money!” His heart
would start thumping and fluttering; he would turn his old white head,
bury his whisker in the pillow, shut his eyes, and con over such
investments as he really could not lose. Then, beside his head
half-hidden in the pillow, there would come and perch the spectral bird
of some unlikely liability, such as a lawsuit that might drive him into
bankruptcy; while, on the other side, touching his silver hair, would
squat the yellow fowl of Socialism. Between these two he would lie
unmoving, save for that hammering of his heart, till at last would come
a drowsiness, and he would fall asleep....
At such times it was always of his money and his children’s and
grandchildren’s money that he thought. It was useless to tell himself
how few his own wants were, or that it might be better for his children
to have to make their way. Such thoughts gave him no relief. His fears
went deeper than mere facts; they were religious, as it were, and
founded in an innermost belief that, by money only, Nature could be held
at bay.
Of this, from the moment when he first made money, his senses had
informed him, and slowly, surely, gone on doing so, till his very being
was soaked through with the conviction. He might be told on Sundays that
money was not everything, but he knew better. Seated in the left-hand
aisle, he seemed lost in reverence--a grandchild on either hand, his old
knees in quiet trousers, crossed, his white-fringed face a little turned
towards the preacher, one neat-gloved hand reposing on his thigh, the
other keeping warm a tiny hand thrust into it. But his old brain was far
away, busy amongst the Tables of Commandment, telling him how much to
spend to get his five per cent. and money back; his old heart was busy
with the little hand tucked into his. There was nothing in such sermons,
therefore, that could quarrel with his own religion, for he did not
hear them; and even had he heard them, they would not have quarrelled,
his own creed of money being but the natural modern form of a religion
that his fathers had interpreted as the laying-up of treasure in the
life to come. He was only able nowadays to _say_ that he believed in any
life to come, so that his commercialism had been forced to find another
outlet, and advance a step, in accordance with the march of knowledge.
His religious feeling about money did not make him selfish, or niggardly
in any way--it merely urged him to preserve himself--not to take risks
that he could reasonably avoid, either in his mode of life, his work, or
in the propagation of his children. He had not married until he had a
position to offer to the latter, sufficiently secure from changes and
chances in this mortal life, and even then he had not been too
precipitate, confining the number to three boys, and one welcome girl,
in accordance with the increase of his income. In the circles where he
moved, his course of action was so normal that no one had observed the
mathematical connection between increasing income and the production and
education of his family. Still less had any one remarked the deep and
silent process by which there passed from him to them the simple
elements of faith.
His children, subtly, and under cover of the manner of a generation
which did not mention money in so many words, had sucked in their
father’s firm religious instinct, his quiet knowledge of the value of
the individual life, his steady and unconscious worship of the means of
keeping it alive. Calmly they had sucked it in, and a thing or two
besides. So long as he was there they knew they could afford to make a
little free with what must come to them by virtue of his creed. When
quite small children, they had listened, rather bored, to his simple
statements about money and the things it bought; presently that
instinct--shared by the very young with dogs and other animals--for
having of the best and consorting with their betters, had helped them
to see the real sense of what he said. As time went on, they found
gentility insisting more and more that this instinct should be
concealed; and they began unconsciously to perfect their father’s creed,
draping its formal tenets in the undress of an apparent disregard. For
the dogma, “Not worth the money!” they would use the words, “Not good
enough!” The teaching, “Business first,” they formulated, “Not more
pleasure than your income can afford, your health can stand, or your
reputation can assimilate.” There was money waiting for them, and they
did not feel it necessary to undertake even those “safe” risks which
their father had been obliged to take, to make that money. But they were
quite to be depended on. In the choosing of their friends, their sports,
their clubs, and occupations, a religious feeling guided them. They knew
precisely just how much their income was, and took care neither to spend
more nor less. And so devoutly did they act up to their principles,
that, whether in the restaurant or country house, whether in the
saleroom of a curio shop, whether in their regiments or their offices,
they could always feel the presence of the godhead blessing their
discreet and comfortable worship. In one respect, indeed, they were more
religious than their father, who still preserved the habit of falling on
his knees at night, to name with Tibetan regularity a strange god; they
did not speak to him about this habit, but they wished he would not do
it, being fond of their old father, who continued them into the past.
They had gently laughed him out of talking about money, they had gently
laughed at him for thinking of it still; but they loved him, and it
worried them in secret that he should do this thing, which seemed to
them dishonest.
With their wives and husband--in course of time they had all
married--they very often came to see him, bringing their children. To
the old man these little visitors were worth more than all hydropathy;
to help in playing with the toys that he himself had given them, to
stroke his grandsons’ yellow heads, and ride them on his knee; to press
his silver whiskers to their ruddy cheeks, pinching their little legs to
feel how much there was of them, and loving them the more, the more
there was to love--this made his heart feel warm. The dearest moments,
he knew now, the consolation of his age, were those he spent reflecting
how--of the young things he loved, who seemed to love him too a
little--not one would have secured to him or her less than twelve or
thirteen hundred pounds a year; more, if he could manage to hold on a
little longer. For fifty years at least the flesh and blood he left
behind would be secure. His eye and mind, quick to notice things like
that, had soon perceived the difference of the younger generation’s
standards from his own; his children had perhaps a deeper veneration for
the means of living while they were alive, but certainly less faith in
keeping up their incomes after they were in their graves. And so,
unconsciously, his speculation passed them by, and travelled to his
grandchildren, telling itself that these small creatures who nestled up
against him, and sometimes took him walks, would, when they came to be
grown men and women, have his simpler faith, and save the money that he
left them, for their own grandchildren. Thus, and thus only, would he
live, not fifty years, but a hundred, after he was dead. But he was
rendered very anxious by the law, which refused to let him tie his money
up in perpetuity.
Firm in his determination to secure himself against the future, he
opposed this strenuous piety to those temptations which beset the
individual, refusing numberless appeals, often much against his
instincts of compassion; opposing with his vote and all his influence
movements to increase the rates or income-tax for such purposes as the
raising of funds to enable aged people without means to die more slowly.
He himself, who laid up yearly more and more for the greater safety of
his family, felt, no doubt--though cynicism shocked him--that these old
persons were only an encumbrance to _their_ families, and should be
urged to dwindle gently out. In such private cases as he came across,
feeling how hard it was, he prayed for strength to keep his hand out of
his pocket, and strength was often given him. So with many other
invitations to depart from virtue. He fixed a certain sum a year--a
hundred pounds--with half-a-crown in the velvet bag on Sundays--to be
offered as libations to all strange gods, so that they might leave him
undisturbed to worship the true god of money. This was effectual; the
strange gods, finding him a man of strong religious principle, yet no
crank--his name appeared in twenty charitable lists, five pounds
apiece--soon let him be, for fear of wasting postage stamps and the
under parts of boots.
After his wife’s death, which came about when he was seventy, he
continued to reside alone in the house that he had lived in since his
marriage, though it was now too large for him. Every autumn he resolved
to make a change next spring; but when spring came, he could not bring
himself to tear his old roots up, and put it off till the spring
following, with the hope, perhaps, that he might then feel more
inclined.
All through the years that he was living there alone, he suffered more
and more from those nightly visitations, of monetary doubts. They
seemed, indeed, to grow more concrete and insistent with every thousand
pounds he put between himself and their reality. They became more
owl-like, more numerous, with each fresh investment; they stayed longer
at a time. And he grew thinner, frailer, every year; pouches came
beneath his eyes.
When he was eighty, his daughter, with her husband and children, came to
live with him. This seemed to give him a fresh lease of life. He never
missed, if he could help it, a visit to the nursery at five o’clock.
There, surrounded by toy bricks, he would remain an hour or more,
building--banks or houses, ships or churches, sometimes
police-stations, sometimes cemeteries, but generally banks. And when
the edifice approached completion, in the glory of its long white
bricks, he waited with a sort of secret ecstasy to feel a small warm
body climb his back, and hear a small voice say in his ear: “What shall
we put in the bank to-day, Granddy?”
The first time this was asked, he had hesitated long before he answered.
During the thirty years that had elapsed since he built banks for his
own children, he had learned that one did not talk of money now,
especially before the young. One used a euphemism for it. The proper
euphemism had been slow to spring into his mind, but it had sprung at
last; and they had placed it in the bank. It was a very little china
dog. They placed it in the entrance hall.
The small voice said: “What is it guarding?”
He had answered: “The bank, my darling.”
The small voice murmured: “But nobody could steal the bank.”
Looking at the little euphemism, he had frowned. It lacked completeness
as a symbol. For a moment he had a wild desire to put a sixpence down,
and end the matter. Two small knees wriggled against his back, arms
tightened round his neck, a chin rubbed itself impatiently against his
whisker. He muttered hastily:
“But they could steal the papers.”
“What papers?”
“The wills, and deeds, and--and cheques.”
“Where are they?”
“In the bank.”
“I don’t see them.”
“They’re in a cupboard.”
“What are they for?”
“For--for grown-up people.”
“Are they to play with?”
“NO!”
“Why is he guarding them?”
“So that--so that everybody can always have enough to eat.”
“Everybody?”
“Everybody.”
“Me, too?”
“Yes, my darling; you, of course.”
Locked in each other’s arms they looked down sidelong at the little
euphemism. The small voice said:
“Now that _he’s_ there, they’re safe, aren’t they?”
“Quite safe.”
He had given up attending to his business, but almost every morning, at
nearly the same hour, he would walk down to his club, not looking very
much at things about the streets, partly because his thoughts were
otherwise engaged, partly because he had found it from the first a
deleterious habit, tending to the overcultivation of the social
instincts. Arriving, he would take the _Times_ and the _Financial News_,
and go to his pet armchair; here he would stay till lunch-time, reading
all that bore in any way on his affairs, and taking a grave view of
every situation. But at lunch a longing to express himself would come,
and he would tell his neighbours tales of his little grandsons, of the
extraordinary things they did, and of the future he was laying up for
them. In the pleasant warmth of mid-day, over his light but satisfying
lunch, surrounded by familiar faces, he would recount these tales in
cheerful tones, and his old grey eyes would twinkle; between him and his
struggle with those nightly apparitions, there were many hours of
daylight, there was his visit to the nursery. But, suddenly, looking up
fixedly with strained eyes, he would put a question such as this: “Do
you ever wake up in the night?” If the answer were affirmative, he would
say: “Do you ever find things worry you then out of--out of all
proportion?” And, if they did, he would clearly be relieved to hear it.
On one occasion, when he had elicited an emphatic statement of the
discomfort of such waking hours, he blurted out: “You don’t ever see a
lot of great owls sitting on your bed, I suppose?” Then, seemingly
ashamed of what he had just asked, he rose, and left his lunch
unfinished.
His fellow-members, though nearly all much younger than himself, had no
unkindly feeling for him. He seemed to them, perhaps, to overrate their
interest in his grandsons and the state of his investments; but they
knew he could not help preoccupation with these subjects; and when he
left them, usually at three o’clock, saying almost tremulously: “I must
be off; my grandsons will be looking out for me!” they would exchange
looks as though remarking: “The old chap thinks of nothing but his
grandchildren.” And they would sit down to “bridge,” taking care to play
within the means their fathers had endowed them with.
But the “old chap” would step into a hansom, and his spirit, looking
through his eyes beneath the brim of his tall hat, would travel home
before him. Yet, for all his hurry, he would find the time to stop and
buy a toy or something on the way.
One morning, at the end of a cold March, they found him dead in bed,
propped on his pillows, with his eyes wide open. Doctors, hastily called
in, decided that he had died from failure of heart action, and fixed
the hour of death at anything from two to four; by the appearance of his
staring pupils they judged that something must have frightened him. No
one had heard a noise, no one could find a sign of anything alarming; so
no one could explain why he, who seemed so well preserved, should thus
have suddenly collapsed. To his own family he had never told the fact,
that every night he woke between the hours of two and four, to meet a
row of owls squatting on the foot-rail of his bed--he was, no doubt,
ashamed of it. He had revealed much of his religious feeling, but not
the real depth of it; not the way his deity of money had seized on his
imagination; not his nightly struggles with the terrors of his spirit,
nor the hours of anguish spent, when vitality was low, trying to escape
the company of doubts. No one had heard the fluttering of his heart,
which, beginning many years ago, just as a sort of pleasant habit to
occupy his wakeful minutes in the dark, had grown to be like the beating
of a hammer on soft flesh. No one had guessed, he least of all, the
stroke of irony that Nature had prepared to avenge the desecration of
her law of balance. She had watched his worship from afar, and quietly
arranged that by his worship he should be destroyed; careless, indeed,
what god he served, knowing only that he served too much.
They brought the eldest of his little grandsons in. He stood a long time
looking, then asked if he might touch the cheek. Being permitted, he
kissed his little finger-tip and laid it on the old man’s whisker. When
he was led away and the door closed, he asked if “Granddy” were “quite
safe”; and twice again that evening he asked this question.
In the early light next morning, before the house was up, the
under-housemaid saw a white thing on the mat before the old man’s door.
She went, and stooping down, examined it. It was the little china dog.
PROGRESS
IX
PROGRESS
Motor cars were crossing the Downs to Goodwood Races. Slowly they
mounted, sending forth an oily reek, a jerky grinding sound; and a cloud
of dust hung over the white road. Since ten o’clock they had been
mounting, one by one, freighted with the pale conquerors of time and
space. None paused on the top of the green heights, but with a
convulsive shaking leaped, and glided swiftly down; and the tooting of
their valves and the whirring of their wheels spread on either hand
along the hills.
But from the clump of beech-trees on the very top nothing of their
progress could be heard, and nothing seen; only a haze of dust trailing
behind them like a hurried ghost.
Amongst the smooth grey beech-stems of that grove were the pallid forms
of sheep, and it was cool and still as in a temple. Outside, the day was
bright, and a hundred yards away in the hot sun the shepherd, a bent old
man in an aged coat, was leaning on his stick. His brown face wrinkled
like a walnut, was fringed round with a stubble of grey beard. He stood
very still, and waited to be spoken to.
“A fine day?”
“Aye, fine enough; a little sun won’t do no harm. ’Twon’t last!”
“How can you tell that?”
“I been upon the Downs for sixty year!”
“You must have seen some changes?”
“Changes in men--an’ sheep!”
“An’ wages, too, I suppose. What were they when you were twenty?”
“Eight shillin’ a week.”
“But living was surely more expensive?”
“So ’twas; the bread was mortial dear, I know, an’ the flour black! An’
piecrust, why, ’twas hard as wood!”
“And what are wages now?”
“There’s not a man about the Downs don’t get his sixteen shillin’; some
get a pound, some more.... There they go! Sha’n’t get ’em out now till
tew o’clock!” His sheep were slipping one by one into the grove of
beech-trees where, in the pale light, no flies tormented them. The
shepherd’s little dark-grey eyes seemed to rebuke his flock because they
would not feed the whole day long.
“It’s cool in there. Some say that sheep is silly. ’Tain’t so very much
that they don’t know.”
“So you think the times have changed?”
“Well! There’s a deal more money in the country.”
“And education?”
“Ah! Ejucation? They spend all day about it. Look at the railways too,
an’ telegraphs! See! That’s bound to make a difference.”
“So, things are better, on the whole?”
He smiled.
“I was married at twenty, on eight shillin’ a week; you won’t find them
doing such a thing as that these days--they want their comforts now.
There’s not the spirit of content about of forty or fifty years agone.
All’s for movin’ away an’ goin’ to the towns; an’ when they get there,
from what I’ve heard, they wish as they was back; but they don’t never
come.”
There was no complaining in his voice; rather, a matter-of-fact and
slightly mocking tolerance.
“You’ll see none now that live their lives up on the Downs an’ never
want to change. The more they get the more they want. They smell the
money these millioneers is spendin’--seems to make ’em think they can do
just anythin’ ’s long as they get some of it themselves. Times past, a
man would do his job, an’ never think because his master was rich that
he could cheat him; he gave a value for his wages, to keep well with
himself. Now, a man thinks because he’s poor he ought to ha’ been rich,
and goes about complainin’, doin’ just as little as he can. It’s my
belief they get their notions from the daily papers--hear too much of
all that’s goin’ on--it onsettles them; they read about this Sawcialism,
an’ these millioneers; it makes a pudden’ in their heads. Look at the
beer that’s drunk about it. For one gallon that was drunk when I was
young there’s twenty gallon now. The very sheep ha’ changed since I
remember; not one o’ them ewes you see before you there, that isn’t
pedigree--and the care that’s taken o’ them! They’d have me think that
men’s improvin’, too; richer they may be, but what’s the use o’ riches
if your wants are bigger than your purse? A man’s riches is the things
he does without an’ never misses.”
And crouching on his knee, he added:
“Ther’ goes the last o’ them; sha’n’t get ’em out now till tew o’clock.
One gone--all go!”
Then squatting down, as though responsibility were at an end, he leaned
one elbow on the grass, his eyes screwed up against the sun. And in his
old brown face, with its myriad wrinkles and square chin, there was a
queer contentment, as though approving the perversity of sheep.
“So riches don’t consist in man’s possessions, but in what he doesn’t
want? You are an enemy of progress?”
“These Downs don’t change--’tis only man that changes; what good’s he
doin’, that’s what I ask meself--he’s makin’ wants as fast as ever he
makes riches.”
“Surely a time must come when he will see that to be really rich his
supply must be in excess of his demand? When he sees that, he will go on
making riches, but control his wants.”
He paused to see if there were any meaning in such words, then answered:
“On these Downs I been, man an’ boy, for sixty year.”
“And are you happy?”
He wrinkled up his brows and smiled.
“What age d’ you think I am? Seventy-six!”
“You look as if you’d live to be a hundred.”
“Can’t expect it! My health’s good though, ’cept for these.”
Like wind-bent boughs all the fingers of both his hands from the top
joint to the tip were warped towards the thumb.
“Looks funny! But I don’t feel ’em. What you don’t feel don’t trouble
you.”
“What caused it?”
“Rheumatiz! I don’t make nothin’ of it. Where there’s doctors there’s
disease.”
“Then you think we make our ailments, too, as fast as we make remedies?”
He slowly passed his gnarled hand over the short grass.
“My missus ’ad the doctor when she died.... See that dust? That’s
motorcars bringin’ folks to Goodwood Races. Wonderful quick-travellin’
things.”
“Ah! That was a fine invention, surely?”
“There’s some believes in them. But if they folk weren’t doin’
everything and goin’ everywhere at once, there’d be no need for them
rampagin’ motors.”
“Have you ever been in one yourself?”
His eyes began to twinkle mockingly.