It was plain that the reason why he looked so straight before him was
that he really had not strength to care to look to right or left--so
white his face was, so puny were his limbs. His clothes had evidently
been designed for others, and this was fortunate, for they prevented the
actual size of him from being seen. He was not, however, what is called
neglected; his face was clean, and the utmost of protection that Fate
and the condition of his parents had vouchsafed was evidently lavished
on him, for round his neck there was a little bit of draggled fur which
should have been round the neck of her against whose thin and shabby
side he leaned. This mother of his was looking at the ground; and from
the expression of her face she seemed to think that looking at the
ground was all life had to offer.
The father sat with his eyes shut. He had shabby clothes, a grey face,
and a grey collar that had once been white. Above the collar his thin
cheeks had evidently just been shaved--for it was Saturday, and by the
colour of those cheeks, and by his boots, whose soles, hardly thicker
than a paper sheet, still intervened between him and the ground, he was
seen not to be a tramp or outdoor person, but an indoor worker of some
sort, and very likely out of work, who had come out to rest in the
company of his wife and family. His eyes being shut, he sat without the
pain of looking at a single thing, moving his jaw at intervals from side
to side, as though he had a toothache.
And between this man who had begotten, and this woman who had borne him,
the child sat, very still, evidently on good terms with them, not
realising that they had brought him out of a warm darkness where he had
been happy, out of a sweet nothingness, into which, and soon perhaps, he
would pass again--not realising that they had so neglected to keep pace
with things, or that things had so omitted to keep pace with them, that
he himself had eaten in his time about one half the food he should have
eaten, and that of the wrong sort. By the expression of his face, that
pale small ghost had evidently grasped the truth that things were as
they had to be. He seemed to sit there reviewing his own life, and
taking for granted that it must be what it was, from hour to hour, and
day to day, and year to year.
And before me, too, the incidents of his small journey passed; I saw
him, in the morning, getting off the family bed, where it was sometimes
warm, and chewing at a crust of bread before he set off to school in
company with other children, some of whom were stouter than himself; saw
him carrying in his small fist the remnants of his feast, and dropping
it, or swopping it away for peppermints, because it tired him to consume
it, having no juices to speak of in his little stomach. I seemed to
understand that, accustomed as he was to eating little, he almost always
wanted to eat less, not because he had any wish to die--nothing so
extravagant--but simply that he nearly always felt a little sick; I felt
that his pale, despondent mother was always urging him to eat, when
there were things to eat, and that this bored him, since they did not
strike him as worth all that trouble with his jaws. She must have found
it difficult indeed to persuade him that there was any point at all in
eating; for, from his looks, he could manifestly not now enjoy anything
but peppermints and kippered herrings. I seemed to see him in his
school, not learning, not wanting to learn, anything, nor knowing why
this should be so, ignorant of the dispensations of a Providence
who--after hesitating long to educate him lest this should make his
parents paupers--now compelled his education, having first destroyed his
stomach that he might be incapable of taking in what he was taught. That
small white creature could not as yet have grasped the notion that the
welfare of the future lay, not with the future, but with the past. He
only knew that every day he went to school with little in his stomach,
and every day came back from school with less.
All this he seemed to be reviewing as he sat there, but not in thought;
his knowledge was too deep for words; he was simply feeling, as a child
that looked as he looked would naturally be feeling, on that bench
between his parents. He opened his little mouth at times, as a small
bird will open its small beak, without apparent purpose; and his lips
seemed murmuring:
“My stomach feels as if there were a mouse inside it; my legs are
aching; it’s all quite natural, no doubt!”
To reconcile this apathy of his with recollections of his unresting,
mirthless energy down alleys and on doorsteps, it was needful to
remember Human Nature, and its exhaustless cruse of courage. For, though
he might not care to live, yet, while he was alive he would keep his end
up, because he must--there was no other way. And why exhaust himself in
vain regrets and dreams of things he could not see, and hopes of being
what he could not be! That he had no resentment against anything was
certain from his patient eyes--not even against those two who sat, one
on either side of him--unaware that he was what he was, in order that
they who against his will had brought him into being, might be forced by
law to keep a self-respect they had already lost, and have the unsought
pride of giving him an insufficiency of things he could not eat. For he
had as yet no knowledge of political economy. He evidently did not view
his case in any petty, or in any party, spirit; he did not seem to look
on himself as just a half-starved child that should have cried its eyes
out till it was fed at least as well as the dogs that passed him; he
seemed to look on himself as that impersonal, imperial thing--the Future
of the Race.
So profound his apathy!
And, as I looked, the “Future of the Race” turned to his father:
“‘Ark at that b----y bird!” he said.
It was a pigeon, who high upon a tree, had suddenly begun to croon. One
could see his head outlined against the grey, unstirring sky, first
bending back, then down into his breast, then back again; and that soft
song of his filled all the air, like an invocation of fertility.
“The Future of the Race” watched him for a minute without moving, and
suddenly he laughed. That laugh was a little hard noise like the
clapping of two boards--there was not a single drop of blood in it, nor
the faintest sound of music; so might a marionette have laughed--a
figure made of wood and wire!
And in that laugh I seemed to hear innumerable laughter, the laughter in
a million homes of the myriad unfed.
So laughed the Future of the richest and the freest and the proudest
race that had ever lived on earth, that February afternoon, with the
little green flames lighted in the grass, under a sky that knew not wind
or sun--so he laughed at the pigeon that was calling for the Spring.
JUSTICE
XVIII
JUSTICE
Thinking of him as he had looked, sitting there in his worn clothes, a
cloth cap crumpled in his hand, leaning a little forward, and staring at
the wall with those eyes of his that looked like fire behind steel bars;
remembering his words: “She’s dead to me--I’ll never think of her again
where I’m going!” I wrote this letter:
“Dear ----,
“From something you said yesterday, I feel that I ought to tell you that
when you get to Canada you will not be free to marry again.
“I was present, as you know, when you told your story in the Police
Court--a story very often told there. I know that you were not to blame,
and that all you said was true. Owing to no fault of yours, your wife
has left you for a life of vice. Through this misfortune you have lost
your home, your children, and your work; and you are going to Canada as
a last resource. You and she will pass the rest of your lives in
different hemispheres. You are still a young man, strong, accustomed to
married life; you are going where married men are wanted, to a country
of great spaces and great loneliness, where your homestead may be miles
from any other.
“This is all true enough; nevertheless you are as closely bound to this
wife who has left you for a life of public shame as if she were the
truest wife and mother in this city.
“If, where you are going, you meet some girl that you would like to
marry, you must not, or you will be a bigamist--a criminal. If this girl
come to you unmarried, she will, of course, lose her good name. Your
children, if you have any, will be born in what is called a state of
shame; that they have had no voice in the matter of their birth won’t
help them, as you will find. If she refuses to come to you
unmarried--and you can hardly blame her--you will probably be driven,
like most men in your position, to get what comfort you can from women
who are like your wife. Society, of course, condemns these women, men of
heart regard them with compassion, men of science with dismay. They
breed canker in the nation; but as you cannot marry again, you will, I
fear, be driven to their company.
“There is nothing special in your case--thousands in this country are in
a similar position; you are all governed by an impartial Law.
“That Law is this: A woman can divorce a man who is faithless and treats
her with cruelty or deserts her. A man can divorce a woman who is
faithless. You could have divorced your wife! Why didn’t you? Let us
see!
“You were first a soldier, and then a working man. They paid you as a
soldier, I believe, one shilling and twopence a day; suppose you saved
the pence, allowing for your wife not being on your hands, and your
children living on air? Fourteenpence a week--three pounds and
eightpence a year, if you were lucky. As a workman your wages were
thirty shillings a week? With four children you could save perhaps your
subscription to the _Hearts of Oak_, and, say, twopence a day besides?
Three pounds and eightpence every year. A divorce in the High Court of
Justice, for to that you were undoubtedly entitled by the Law, would
have cost you from sixty to a hundred pounds. So, if you could have
arranged to keep your witnesses alive, you might, with strict economy,
have been granted your decree, if not yourself already dead, in, say,
twenty years.
“In this delay there is nothing peculiar or unjust. The Law, for rich or
poor, artisan or peer, is, as you know, identical. The Courts make no
distinction in favour of the wealthy over a man earning his seventy-odd
pounds a year, with five pounds in the Savings Bank--a decree for
millionaire, or clerk, or working man, costs just about the same.
“To this rule, however, there is one exception; it is of course in
favour of the poor. One who can prove that he is not worth the sum of
five-and-twenty pounds is entitled to the name of pauper, and can sue
for divorce _in formâ pauperis_. This does not indeed apply to working
men or clerks in work; but you, who, knocked out of time by the conduct
of your wife, had lost your work, and were sleeping in the parks at
night or in a common lodging house, not knowing where to turn, could not
have proved your worth at five-and-twenty pence. You could have sued _in
formâ pauperis_. This was a great privilege! You should have found a
lawyer who would undertake your case on no security, obtained your
evidence without the payment of a penny, got your witnesses to come to
the Court and give their time for nothing (when every idle hour meant
bread out of their mouths); you should have achieved these triumphs over
Nature, and you might have been divorced for anything from seven to
fifteen pounds. True, you had not seven to fifteen pence, but--you had
the privilege!
“It is admitted that you were a good husband to your wife, as good a
husband as a man could be; it is admitted that the fault was hers
entirely. It is admitted that you were entitled to relief. By the Law,
which is the same for all, however, this was not enough.
“For this is what I want you to fully understand: _A man of means_ may
drive his wife to loathe him, provided he stop short of certain definite
things--for the Law does not allow him to be ‘cruel’ to her; he may
entertain himself with other women provided that she does not know, for
the Law does not allow him to be ‘faithless’; he may be, in fact, at
heart a ruffian or a rascal, but--_having means_--if she leave him for
another, he can, unless he has bad luck, be sure of his decree. Thus, it
did not really matter whether you were false to her, so long as she did
not know; it was almost superfluous to be so kind; what really mattered
was that, either, as a working man with thirty shillings a week, you had
sixty to a hundred pounds--or, as a penniless pauper, you had seven to
fifteen.
“The Law of Divorce, like all our laws, is made without fear or favour,
for the protection and safety of us all; it is founded in justice and
equity, that grievances may be redressed, and all who are wrong may have
their remedy. It does not concern itself whether a man is rich or poor,
but administers its simple principles, requiring those who are not
destitute to pay for their decrees at a price that is the same for all,
whatever their means may be; requiring those who are destitute to pay
for their decrees at a price beyond their means.
“I seem to hear you asking: ‘Could I not have been granted a remedy at a
price proportioned to my means? Must I, and every working man whose wife
leaves him as mine did, to drink in public houses, and walk the streets
at night, be condemned for ever after to live alone, or to live in
immorality?’
“The answer is a simple one: ‘If all the clerks and working men, and all
those wives of clerks and working men--to whom, like you, divorce was
due by almost general consent, and was indeed by almost general consent
deemed of a desperate importance--were enabled to obtain it at a price
within their means, several thousand more divorces would each year be
granted in this country. This would have a disastrous effect upon the
statistics of the marriage tie. Public Opinion, formed, you must
remember, exclusively amongst your betters (for on such subjects working
men are, and always have been, dumb), formed exclusively by such as can
afford to pay for their decrees--this great Public Opinion would feel
that a backward step was being taken on the path of moral rectitude. It
would feel that, in granting what you, the People, in your dumbness and
short sight might be tempted to think was common justice, it would be
sacrificing the substance of morals to the shadow. The immorality to
which you and your like under the present law are, and ever will be,
forced, need never lie open to the light of day, never become a matter
of statistics, and offend the Public Eye. What is not a matter of
statistics can do no damage to the country’s morals or the country’s
name. Public Opinion is itself secure in the enjoyment of the rights and
privileges granted by the law, and it has decided by a simple sacrifice
to conserve the moral fame of all. There must--it reasons--be a
sacrifice; then let us sacrifice those without the means to pay! It is
an accident that they, in their thousands, are not included in
ourselves; some must suffer that we may all be moral!’
“This is the answer. It is too much, perhaps, to ask you, from the marsh
of suffering, with your low personal point of view, to appreciate the
heights of impersonality reached in this vicarious sacrifice. But you
may possibly respect its depths of common sense. Can you blame the
practical wisdom of this Public Opinion, in which you have no part? If
you had a part in it, would you not yourself endorse it? If _you_ were a
man of means, that is of means sufficient to enjoy the privileges of the
Law, would you seriously offer to exert yourself to upset your
conception of your country’s moral worth, and lose secretly a little of
your self-esteem, that you might extend those privileges to such of your
fellow-citizens as could not pay for them? Would you not rather feel: My
own position is secure; this idea is only sentiment, mere _abstract_
justice! If they want it they must pay for it!
“By no means think that this great principle of payment is confined
merely to divorce; it underlies all justice in a greater or a less
degree. It is ‘money makes the mare to go!’ It is money that dictates
the measure of justice and its methods. But this is so mingled with the
essence of our lives that we do not even notice it. Why, you could
hardly find a man who, if you went to him in private and put your case,
would not say at once that you were hardly used! To the Law you cannot
go privately; and the Law is the guardian of all justice.
“I have told you the requirements of the Law. You have not fulfilled
them. And, having made this error, you must, evidently, now go forth,
either to enjoy your own society for the remainder of your days, or, as
Nature drives you, to consort with those who at each touch will remind
you of what your wife has now become; and in this journey of enjoyment,
whichever of the two journeys it may be, you will be sustained, no
doubt, by the consciousness that you are serving the morality of your
country, and strengthening the esteem in which the marriage tie is held.
You will be inspired by the knowledge that you are sharing this voyage
of pleasure and of privilege with thousands of other men and women, as
decent and as kind as you. And you will feel, year by year, prouder and
prouder of your country that has reached these heights of justice....”
HOPE
XIX
HOPE
Wet or fine, hot or cold, nothing was more certain than that the lame
man would pass, leaning on his twisted oaken stick, his wicker basket
slung on his shoulder. In that basket, covered by a bit of sacking, was
groundsel, and rarely, in the season, a few mushrooms kept carefully
apart in a piece of newspaper.
His blunt, wholesome, weather-beaten face with its full brown beard, now
going grey, was lined and sad because his leg continually gave him pain.
That leg had shrivelled through an accident, and being now two inches
shorter than it should have been, did little save remind him of
mortality. He had a respectable, though not an affluent, appearance, for
his old blue overcoat, his trousers, waistcoat, hat, were ragged from
long use and stained by weather. He had been a deep-sea fisherman
before his accident, but now he made his living by standing on the
pavement at a certain spot, in Bayswater, from ten o’clock to seven in
the evening. And any one who wished to give her bird a luxury would stop
before his basket, and buy a pennyworth of groundsel.
Often--as he said--he had “a job to get it,” rising at five o’clock, and
going out of London by an early tram to the happy hunting grounds of
those who live on the appetites of caged canaries. Here, dragging his
injured limb with difficulty through ground that the heavens seldom
troubled to keep dry for him, he would stoop and toilfully amass the
small green plant with its close yellow-centred heads, though often--as
he mentioned--“there don’t seem no life like in the stuff, the frosts
ha’ spiled it!” Having collected all that Fate permitted him, he would
take the tram back home, and start out for his day’s adventure.
Now and again, when things had not gone well, his figure would be seen
stumping home through darkness as late as nine or ten o’clock at night.
On such occasions his grey-blue eyes, which had never quite lost their
look of gazing through sea-mists, would reflect the bottom of his soul,
where the very bird of weariness lay with its clipped wings, for ever
trying to regain the air.
In fact--as he had no need to tell you--he was a “trier” from year’s end
to year’s end, but he had no illusions concerning his profession--there
was “nothing in it”; though it was better on the whole than flowers,
where there was less than nothing. And, after all, having got accustomed
to the struggles of that bird of weariness within his soul, he would
even perhaps have missed it, had it at last succeeded in rising from the
ground and taking flight.
“An ’ard life!” he had been heard to say when groundsel was scarce,
customers scarcer, and the damp had struck up into his shrivelled leg.
This, stated as a matter of fact, was the extent of his general
complaint, though he would not unwillingly descant on the failings of
his groundsel, his customers, and leg, to the few who could appreciate
such things. But, as a rule, he stood or sat, silent, watching the world
go by, as in old days he had watched the waves drift against his
anchored fishing-smack; and the look of those blurred-blue, far-gazing
eyes of his, in their extraordinary patience, was like a constant
declaration of the simple and unconscious creed of man: “I hold on till
I drop.”
What he thought about while he stood there it was difficult to
say--possibly of old days round the Goodwins, of the yellow buttons of
his groundsel that refused to open properly, of his leg, and dogs that
would come sniffing at his basket and showing their contempt, of his
wife’s gouty rheumatism, and herrings for his tea, of his arrears of
rent, of how few people seemed to want his groundsel, and once more of
his leg.
Practically no one stopped to look at him, unless she wanted a
pennyworth of groundsel for her pale bird. And when they did look at
him they saw--nothing symbolic--simply a brown-bearded man, with deep
furrows in his face, and a lame leg, whose groundsel was often of a
quality that they did not dare to offer their canaries. They would tell
him so, adding that the weather was cold; to which, knowing a little
more about it than themselves, he would reply: “Yes, m’m--you wouldn’t
believe how I feel it in my leg.” In this remark he was extremely
accurate, but they would look away, and pass on rather hastily, doubting
whether a man should mention a lame leg--it looked too much as if he
wanted to make something out of it. In truth he had the delicacy of a
deep-sea fisherman, but he had owned his leg so long that it had got on
his nerves; it was too intimate a part of all his life, and speak of it
he must. And sometimes, but generally on warm and genial days, when his
groundsel was properly in bloom and he had less need of adventitious
help, his customers would let their feelings get the better of them and
give him pennies, when ha’pennies would have been enough. This,
unconsciously, had served to strengthen his habit of alluding to his
leg.
He had, of course, no holidays, but occasionally he was absent from his
stand. This was when his leg, feeling that he was taking it too much as
a matter of course, became what he would call “a mass o’ pain.” Such
occasions threw him behindhand with his rent; but, as he said: “If you
can’t get out, you can’t--can you?” After these vacations he would make
special efforts, going far afield for groundsel, and remaining on his
stand until he felt that if he did not get off it then, he never would.
Christmas was his festival, for at Christmas people were more indulgent
to their birds, and his regular customers gave him sixpence. This was
just as well, for, whether owing to high living, or merely to the cold,
he was nearly always laid up about that time. After this annual bout of
“brownchitis,” as he called it, his weather-beaten face looked strangely
pale, his blue eyes seemed to have in them the mist of many watches--so
might the drowned ghost of a deep-sea fisherman have looked; and his
pale roughened hand would tremble, hovering over the groundsel that had
so little bloom, trying to find something that a bird need not despise.
“You wouldn’t believe the job I had to find even this little lot,” he
would say. “Sometimes I thought I’d leave me leg be’ind, I was that weak
I couldn’ seem to drag it through the mud at all. An’ my wife, she’s got
the gouty rheumatiz. You’ll think that I’m all trouble!” And, summoning
God-knows-what spirit of hilarity, he smiled. Then, looking at the leg
he had nearly left behind, he added somewhat boastfully: “You see, it’s
got no strength in it at all--there’s not a bit o’ muscle left.... Very
few people,” his eyes and voice seemed proudly saying, “have got a leg
like this!”
To the dispassionate observer of his existence it was a little difficult
to understand what attraction life could have for him; a little
difficult to penetrate down through the blackness of his continual toil
and pains, to the still living eyes of that bird of weariness, lying
within his soul, moving always, if but slightly, its wounded stumps of
wings. It seemed, on the whole, unreasonable of this man to cling to
life, since he was without prospect of anything but what was worse in
this life; and, in the matter of a life to come, would dubiously remark:
“My wife’s always a-tellin’ me we can’t be no worse off where we’re
a-goin’. An’ she’s right, no doubt, if so be as we’re goin’ anywhere!”
And yet, so far as could be seen, the thought: “Why do I continue
living?” never came to him. It almost seemed as if it must be giving him
a secret joy to measure himself against his troubles. And this was
fortunate, for in a day’s march one could not come across a better omen
for the future of mankind.