In such wise, I imagine, will George the Fourth reply. He is an
admirable foil to the Most Wonderful Man on Earth. He regales you with
no false sentiment; he is five feet ten in his socks, and he is
clamorously indignant when you suggest that he will one day "get
married." He considers love to be "damned foolishness," and despises
"womanisers." He likes "tarts," has one in most ports of the Atlantic
sea-board, and even writes to a certain Mexican enchantress, who lives
in a nice little room over a nice little shop in a nice little street
in the nice little town of Vera Cruz. What does he write? Frankly I
don't know. What does he say, when he has dressed himself in dazzling
white raiment and goes ashore in Surabaya or Singapore, and sits down
to tea with Japanese girls whose eyes are swollen with belladonna and
whose touch communicates fire? How can I answer?
"George," I say, "what would your mother think?"
George is not communicative. He flicks ash from his cigarette and
picks up a month-old _Reynolds's_. And that is a sufficient answer to
my accusations, though he does not realize it. I, at any rate, have
not the face to upbraid a lonely youth, without home or girl friends
from one year's end to another, when in that same _Reynolds's_ I see
page after page of "cases." If these people swerve, if they break the
tables of the law every week, surely George the Fourth may hold up his
head. You see, in Geordie-land, in the ports of Tyne and Wear, where
George the Fourth was bred, there are many engineers who have been out
in steamers working up and down the China coast, who have had nice
little homes in Hankow, Hong-Kong, or Shanghai, with Japanese wives
all complete. Then when the charter was up, and the steamer came home,
these practical men left homes and wives behind them, and all was just
as before. That is George's dream. "China or Burma coast-trade. That's
the job for me when I get ma tickut." It is useless for a stern
moralist like me to argue, because I feel certain that, being what he
is, he would be entirely wise and right.
What an utter futility is marriage to a sea-going engineer! Here is
my friend McGorren, a hard-working and Christian man. He is chief
of a boat in the Burmese oil trade. His wife is dead; he has three
children, who are being brought up with their cousins in North London.
McGorren has been out East two years. It will be another two years
before he can come home. Where is the morality of this? He has no
home. His little ones grow up strangers to him; they are mothered by a
stranger. He is voteless, yet subject to income tax. He can have no
friendships, no society, no rational enjoyment save reading. Nothing!
And what is his return? Four hundred a year and all found. I look into
the frank eyes of George the Fourth and I am mute. In no philosophy,
in no "Conduct of Life," in no "Lesson for the Day" which I have read
can I discover any consolation or sane rule of living for such as he.
Is not this a terrible gap in Ruskin, Emerson, and Co.? I take up the
first and I ask George to listen. He is perfectly willing, because, he
says with reverence, I am "a scholar," and I have read to him before.
"... There _must_ be work done by the arms, or none of us could live.
There _must_ be work done by the brains, or the life we get would not
be worth having. And the same men cannot do both. There is rough work
to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done,
and gentlemen must do it; and it is physically impossible that one
class should do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of no use
to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk to
the workman about the honourableness of manual labour and the dignity
of humanity. Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us;
and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or
driving an express train against the north wind all night, or holding
a collier's helm in a gale on a lee shore, or whirling white-hot metal
at a furnace mouth, is not the same man at the end of his day, or
night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything
comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or
painting pictures."
George nods. He understands exactly what is meant. His father is
skipper of a collier, his brother is in a steel works. Probably he and
I know, better than John Ruskin, how rough work "takes the life out of
us." But when I continue, and read to him what the wise man teaches
concerning justice to men, and never-failing knight-errantry towards
women, and love for natural beauty, even awe-struck George becomes
slightly sardonic, and his mouth comes down at the corners. Let me
formulate his thoughts. He is asking how can one be just when
the work's _got_ to be done, and blame _must_ fall on somebody's
shoulders? How can one feel and act rightly towards women when one
is young, yet compelled to live a life of alternate celibacy and
licence? How can one love nature, even the sea, when the engine-room
temperature is normally 90 deg. F., and often 120 deg. F., when the
soul cries out against the endless rolling miles? Wise of the world,
give answer! We two poor rough toilers sit at your feet and wait upon
your words.
You will see, now, why I want George the Fourth to fall in love. But
with whom is he to fall in love? Who courts the society of a sailor in
a foreign port? Seamen's bethels? Ah, yes! The gentle English ladies
in foreign ports are very sympathetic, very kind, very pleasant, at
the Wednesday evening concert in the rebuilt Genoese palace or the
deserted Neapolitan hotel, or the tin tabernacle amid the white sand
and scrub; but they take good care to keep together at the upper end
of the room, and the audience is railed off from them if possible,
while the merry girls outside, who live shameful lives, and whose
existence is ignored by the missionary, link their arms in George's
and take him to their cosy little boxes high up behind those beautiful
green blinds....
"It's a hell of a life, but we've just got to mak' the best of it,"
says George, and he lounges off to join the talk in the Second's room.
I, too, sigh when he is gone. The best of it! Are these heroes of mine
right after all?
"_Then wherefore sully the entrusted gem
Of high and noble life with thoughts so sick?
Why pierce high-fronted honour to the quick
For nothing but a dream?_"