|
ON A FINE DAY
|It's just like summer! That has been the
refrain all day. When I have
forgotten to say it, Jane has said it, or the
bee expert has shouted it
from the orchard with the freshness of a sudden and
delighted discovery.
There are some people of penurious emotions and speech,
like the
Drumtochty farmer in Ian Maclaren's story, who would disapprove
of
this iteration. They would find it wasteful and frivolous. They do
not
understand that we go on saying it over and over again, like the
birds,
for the sheer joy of saying it. Listen to that bullfinch in the
coppice.
There he goes skipping from branch to branch and twig to twig,
and
after each skip he pauses to say, "It's just like summer," and from
a
neighbouring tree his mate twitters confirmation in perfect time.
I've
listened to them for half an hour and they've talked about nothing
else.
In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the
great
baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below
the
paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little
doubtfully
and tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to
be well
aired before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who
knows
his score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too,
has
only one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to
the
world, but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative
singer,
and not a conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush,
who
seems never to forget the listening world.
In the calm, still air,
hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
There are far-off, boisterous
shouts of holiday makers rattling along
the turnpike in wagons to some
village festival (a belated football
match, I fancy); the laughter of
children in the beech woods behind; the
cheerful outdoor sounds of a world
that has come out into the gardens
and the fields. From one end of the hamlet
there is the sound of
hammering; from the other the sound of sawing. That
excellent tenor
voice that comes up from the allotments below belongs to
young Dick. I
have not heard it for four years or more; but it has been heard
in many
lands and by many rivers from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick
would
rather be singing in the allotment with his young brother Sam
(the
leader of the trebles in the village choir) than anywhere else in
the
vide world. "Yes, I've been to Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over
the
'Oly Land," he says. "I don't care if I never see the 'Oly Land
again.
Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far as I'm concerned. This is
good
enough for me--that is, if there's a place for a chap that wants to
get
married to live in."
Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the
old village dame who sits at
her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil
sunshine. "Well, this is all
right, ain't it, mother?"
"Yes," says the
old lady, "it's just like summer."
"And to think," continues the voice,
"that there was a thick layer o'
snow a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't
wonder if there's more to
come yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring
according to the calendar,
and it stands to reason summer ain't really come
yet, you know, though
it do seem like it, don't it?"
"Yes, it's just
like summer," repeats the old lady tranquilly.
There in the clear
distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
sunlight. It is the
banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
like summer there no
doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we
are here. Weather in town
is only an incident--a pleasurable incident
or a nuisance. It decides whether
you will take a stick or an umbrella,
whether you will wear a straw hat or a
bowler, a heavy coat or a
mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place
inside the bus or
outside. It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or
postpone your
visit to the theatre. But it only touches the surface of life,
and for
this reason the incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely
as
an acquaintance of a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when
he
is in a good humour and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
But
in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven.
It is
politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual
diversion. You
study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and
watch the change of
the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the
mood of the public. When
I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a
fine day, or has been a cold night,
or looks like rain, it is not a
conventional civility. It is the formal
opening of the discussion of
weighty matters. It involves the prospects of
potatoes and the sowing of
onions, the blossoms on the trees, the effects of
weather on the poultry
and the state of the hives. I do not suppose that
there is a moment of
his life when Jim is unconscious of the weather or
indifferent to
it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not care what happens
to
the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands and
secular
interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is a
stem
Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the
chapel
in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual,
always
trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold
wi'
work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer
to
dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. "I don't hold
wi'
work on Sundays," he would repeat inflexibly.
[Illustration:
0197]
And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the
other
end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with
the
weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to
call
her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly
upward.
It is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she
wants
hens. If the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by
an
unerring instinct to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene
ruin
of feathers. The hard frost last winter destroyed her store of
potatoes
when everybody else's escaped, and it was her hive that brought
the
"Isle of Wight" into our midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh,
holds
that the last was a visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had
a
death in the family--true, it was only a second cousin, but it was
"in
the family"--and had neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the
hive.
And of course they died. What else could they do, poor things?
Widow
Walsh has no patience with people who fly in the face of Providence
in
this way.
But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is
the most
unremittingly malevolent. It is either "smarty hot" or "smarty
cold." If
it isn't giving her a touch of "brownchitis," or "a blowy feeling
all up
the back," or making her feel "blubbed all over," it is dripping
through
her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with
smoke,
or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her
solitary
life. I think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts
the
hill-side like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he
even
smiles, but his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At
the
bottom he is a terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor
country
woman no end of work, and makes her life a burden.
But to-day
warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
When she brings a
basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that "it is
a bit better to-day."
This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays
to the weather. And we
translate it for her into "Yes, it's just like
summer."
In the orchard
a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
damson trees there
is the authentic note of high summer. For the most
part the trees are still
as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees
are white with blossom, and
offer the first real feast for the bees
which fill the branches with the hum
of innumerable wings, like the note
of an aerial violin infinitely prolonged.
A bumble bee adds the boom of
his double bass to the melody as he goes in his
heavy, blustering way
from blossom to blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow,
but he is
as full of the gossip of summer as the peacock butterfly that
comes
flitting back across the orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as
Old
Benjy, who saluted me over the hedge just now with the remark that
he
didn't recall the like of this for a matter o' seventy year. Yes,
seventy
year if 'twas a day.
Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of
something about seventy
years ago, for his special vanity is his years, and
he rarely talks
about anything in the memory of this generation. "I be nearer
a
'underd," he says, "than seventy," by which I think he means that he
is
eighty-six. He longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I
see
no reason why he shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old
boy,
still does a good day's gardening and has come up the lane on this
hot
day at a nimble speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known
to
have made his coffin and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not
from
any morbid yearning for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of
warding
him off, just as the rest of us "touch wood" lest evil befall.
"It's
just like summer," he says.
"I remember when I was a boy in the
year eighteen-underd-and-varty...."
[Illustration:
0200]
[Illustration: 0201]
ON WOMEN AND
TOBACCO
|I see that Mr Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been
talking to
women very seriously on the subject of smoking. "Would you like to
see
your mother smoke?" asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he
was
addressing, and Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing
tobacco
smoke in the face of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have
mixed
feelings on this subject, and in order to find out what I really think
I
will write about it. And in the first place let us dispose of the
baby.
I do not want to see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of
the
baby. But neither do I want to see father doing so. If father is
smoking
when he nurses the baby he will, I am sure, turn his head when he
puffs
out his smoke. Do not let us drag in the baby.
The real point is
in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
affection for your mother
be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
not, of course, ask the question
in relation to your father. It would be
absurd to say that your affection for
your father was lessened because
he smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner.
You would as soon think of
disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton.
It is a matter of
taste which has no moral implications either way. You may
say it is
wasteful and unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to
the
habit regardless of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that _women_ must
not
smoke because the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that _men_
may.
He would no more say this than he would say that it is right for men
to
live in stuffy rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is
right
for men to get drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter
of
drunkenness there is no discrimination between the sexes. We may
feel
that it is more tragic in the case of the woman, but it is
equally
disgusting in both sexes.
What Mr Hicks really maintains is
that a habit which is innocent in men
is vicious in women. But this is a
confusion of thought. It is mixing up
morals with customs. Custom has
habituated us to men smoking and women
not smoking, and we have converted it
into a moral code. Had the custom
been otherwise we should have been equally
happy with it. If Carlyle,
for example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he
would have answered the
question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used
to smoke their
pipes together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time
and
eternity, and no one who has read his letters will doubt his love
for
her. There are no such letters from son to mother in all literature.
And
of course Mr Hicks knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not
be
surprised to know that at dinner to-night he will be in the company
of
some women who smoke, and that he will be as cordial with them as
with
those who do not smoke.
And yet.... Last night I was coming along
Victoria Street on the top of
a bus, and saw two young women in front light
cigarettes and begin to
smoke. And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I
always do at these
now not infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I
was sorry, for I
had been smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all
guilty. If
smoking is an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in
the
case of women as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see
women
smoking outdoors while I am doing the same thing myself? You are
an
irrational fellow, said I. Of course I am an irrational fellow,
I
replied. We are all irrational fellows. If we were brought to
the
judgment seat of pure reason how few of us would escape the
cells.
Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two
young
women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of
smoke
was a flag--the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got
perplexed
again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women--this
universal
claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous fact
of
the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag. Yet
when
I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it
myself),
flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I rejoice,
I
felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I came
to
the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These
young
women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men
smoked
on the top of the bus they must smoke too--not perhaps because
they
liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them
on
an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge
of
servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the
symbols of
men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of
women, but
preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to
their finer
perceptions and traditions.
But here my perplexity returned. It is not
the fact of those young women
smoking that offends you, I said addressing
myself. It is the fact of
their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you
agree that the habit of
smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of
women as of men,
why should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised
in their
case, while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself
are
smoking at this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged
in
defending the propriety of women smoking, and at the same time
mentally
reprobating the conduct of the young women who are smoking in
front
of you, not because they are smoking, but because (like you) they
are
smoking in public. How do you reconcile such confusions of
mind?
At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the
horns
of a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to
the
habit. And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to
defend
differential smoking conditions for men and women. If the main
position
was surrendered no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked
in
public then women could smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and
cigars
then women could smoke pipes and cigars. And at the thought of
women
smoking pipes on the top of buses, I realised that I had not yet found
a
path out of the absurd bog in which I had become mentally
involved.
Then something happened which suggested another solution. The
young
women rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent
was
wafted with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had
thrown
their cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those
heavy,
languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The
trivial
fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the
man's
tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to
adopt
the woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint
and
wear rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my
perplexity.
The mind revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered
and
be-ringed. Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their
cheeks.
But Disraeli was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort
of
belated tale from the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of
men
universally revolts against paint, powder, and perfume. And
asking
myself why a habit, which custom had made tolerable in the case
of
women, became grotesque and offensive if imagined in connection
with
men, I saw a way out of my puzzle. I dismissed the view that
the
difference of sex accounted for the different emotions awakened. It
was
the habit itself which was objectionable. Familiarity with it in
the
case of women had dulled our perceptions to the reality. It was
only
when we conceived the habit in an unusual connection--imagined men
going
about with painted and powdered faces, with rings in their ears
and
heavy scents on their clothes--that its essential vulgarity and
uncleanness
were freshly and intensely presented to the mind.
And that, said I, is
the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit
in the abstract which is
vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in
the case of man has deadened
our sense of the fact, but the adoption
of the habit by women, coupled with
the fact that there is no logical
halting-place between the cigarette indoors
and a pipe on the top of the
bus, gives us what the Americans call a new
view-point. From that new
view-point we are bound to admit that there is much
to be said against
tobacco and not much to be said for it--except, of course,
that we like
it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk
to the
men as well as to the women.
Then perhaps we will see what can
be done. For myself, I make no
promise. After forty, says Meredith, we are
wedded to our habits. And I,
alas, am long past
forty....
[Illustration: 0207]
[Illustration:
0208]
DOWN TOWN
|Through the grey mists that hang over
the water in the late autumn
afternoon there emerges a deeper shadow. It is
like the serrated mass of
a distant range of mountains, except that the
sky-line is broken with
a precision that suggests the work of man rather than
the careless
architecture of Nature The mass is compact and isolated. It
rises
from the level of the water, sheer on either side, in bold
precipitous
cliffs, broken by horizontal lines, and dominated by one kingly,
central
peak that might be the Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of
the
spire of some cathedral fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean
race.
As the vessel from afar moves slowly through the populous waters
and
between the vaguely defined shores of the harbour, another
shadow
emerges ahead, rising out of the sea in front of the mountain mass.
It
is a colossal statue, holding up a torch to the open
Atlantic.
Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes
definition.
It turns to houses made with hands, vast structures with
innumerable
windows. Even the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement
of
myriad windows. The day begins to darken and a swift
transformation
takes place. Points of light begin to shine from the windows
like stars
in the darkening firmament, and soon the whole mountain range
glitters
with thousands of tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a
fairy
palace, glowing with illuminations from the foundations to the
topmost
height of the giddy precipices, the magic spectacle culminating
in
the scintillating pinnacle of the slender cathedral spire. The
first
daylight impression was of something as solid and enduring as
the
foundations of the earth; the second, in the gathering twilight, is
of
something slight and fanciful, of' towering proportions but
infinitely
fragile structure, a spectacle as airy and dream-like as a tale
from the
"Arabian Nights."
It is "down town." It is America thrusting
out the spear-head of its
astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of
this tongue of rock that
lies between the Hudson River and the East River is
massed the greatest
group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain
range, all over
the tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an
incalculable
maze of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful
fashion
of the London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of
its
direction, but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or
east
and west, crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise
to
the Harlem River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this
amazing
island of Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which
the
noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many
lofty
buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it
to
gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the
many
churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes,
giving,
on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as
you
move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the
air
above. And around the Grand Central Station, which is one of
the
architectural glories of "up town" New York, the great hotels
stand
like mighty fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the
great
terminus. And in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be
whirled
to the twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which
you
are summoned.
But it is in "down town," on the tip of the tongue
that is put out
to the Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most
startlingly to the
stranger. It is like a gesture of power. There are other
cities, no
doubt, that make an equally striking appeal to the
eye--Salzburg,
Innsbruck, Edinburgh, Tunis--but it is the appeal of nature
supplemented
by art. Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough.
There is not
an approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any
shock of
surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields
behind,
that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more
continuous,
and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and,
through New
York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before
you
land. It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness.
It
ascends its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its
invitation
over the Atlantic. "Down town" stands like a strong man on the
shore
of the ocean, asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies
behind
these terrific battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers
to
the skies. Look at this muscular development. And I am only the
advance
agent. I am only the symbol of what lies behind. I am only a
foretaste
of the power that heaves and throbs through the veins of the giant
that
bestrides this continent for three thousand miles, from his gateway
to
the Atlantic to his gateway, to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes
to
the Gulf of Mexico.
And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the
impression of this
terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the
impression from
within, stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in
which Broadway
ends, a street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street
imprisoned
between two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude
more'
lofty than the cross of St Paul's Cathedral--square towers,
honeycombed
with thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people,
flying
up in lifts--called "elevators" for short--clicking at
typewriters,
performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who
reigns
at the threshold of the giant.
For this is the very keep of his
castle. Here is the throne from which
he rules the world. This little street
running out of the Grand Canyon
is Wall Street, and that low, modest
building, looking curiously demure
in the midst of these monstrous bastions,
is the House of Morgan, the
high priest of Big Money. A whisper from this
street and distant worlds
are shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands,
cap in hand, on
the kerbstone of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks
and its
sovereigns wilting away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as
you
stand, in devout respect before the modest threshold of the high
priest
a babel of strange sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You
turn
towards it and come suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more
strange
than anything pictured by Hogarth--in the street a jostling mass
of
human beings, fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps
like
jockeys or pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms
extended
high as if in prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers
working
with frantic symbols, their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and
at
a hundred windows in the great buildings on either side of the
street
little groups of men and women gesticulating back as wildly to the
mob
below. It is the outside market of Mammon.
You turn from this
strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
great cathedral that you
saw from afar towering over these battlements
like the Matterhorn. The nearer
view does not disappoint you. Slender
and beautifully proportioned, it rises
in great leaps to a pinnacle
nearly twice as high as the cross of St Paul's
Cathedral. It is the
temple of St Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured
the wealth
acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the
most
significant building in America and the first turret to catch the
noose
of light that the dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the
East.
You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the
forty-ninth
floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices,
tier
after tier, offices of banks and publishers and merchants
and
jewellers, like a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has
been
miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological "fault." And
at
the forty-ninth floor you get out and take another "local" train to
the
top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the
great
precipices of the Grand Canon, down to the streets where the
moving
throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants
or
black-beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement.
And in the
midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
with tiny
spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to
be large churches,
St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
churches. Once New York
nestled under their shadows; now they are
swallowed up and lost at the base
of the terrific structures that
loom above them. In one of them you will have
seen the pew of George
Washington still decorated with the flag of the
thirteen stars of the
original union. Perhaps you will be tempted to see in
this inverted
world an inverted civilisation. There will flash on your mind's
eye the
vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over
the
secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to
however
negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the
supremacy
of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this
astonishing
spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship
crouch
at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is
the
unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which
St
Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars.
And for the
correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the
scene below to the
scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so
near that you feel you
could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open
Atlantic, with all its
suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million
a year, that has flowed, with
its babel of tongues and its burden of
hopes, past the statue with the torch
that stands in the midst of the
harbour, to be swallowed up in the vastness
of the great continent that
lies behind you. You turn and look over the
enormous city that, caught
in the arms of its two noble rivers, extends over
many a mile before
you, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the far bank of one
stream,
and its overflow of Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In
the
brilliant sunshine and the clear, smokeless atmosphere the eye
travels
far over this incredible vista of human activity. And beyond the
vision
of the eye, the mind carries the thought onward to the great lakes
and
the seething cities by their shores, and over the illimitable
plains
westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, but still obedient
to
the stars and stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the
tropic
sea.
And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New
York to the
far horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous
questionings.
They will not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards
those
horizons, after days and nights of crowded experiences in many
fields
of activity, you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On
the
contrary, they will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a
sense
of power unlike anything else the world has to offer--the power
of
immeasurable resources, still only in the infancy of their
development,
of inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs
the
mind, of a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one--one in
a
certain fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the
confident
prime of their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities
of
the day before them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with
its
crudeness and freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as
to
something avuncular and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late
afternoon, a
little tired and more than a little disillusioned and
battered by the
journey. For him the light has left the morning
hills, but here it still
clothes those hills with hope and spurs on to
adventure.
That strong
man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
his towers to the
skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
"the goods." He holds
the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
power is not very clear,
even to himself. He started out, under the
inspiration of a great prophet, to
rescue Europe and the world from the
tyranny of militarism, but the infamies
of European statesmanship and
the squalid animosities of his own household
have combined to chill the
chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has
fallen a victim to reaction
at home. He is filled with panic. He sees
Bolshevism behind every bush,
and a revolutionist in everyone who does not
keep in step. Americanism
has shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a
creed of American
interests, and the "100 per cent. American" in every
disguise of
designing self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against
everything
that is significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is
not
a moment when the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in
the
harbour, can feel very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is
no
longer lit to invite the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On
the
contrary, she turns her back on America and warns the alien away.
Her
torch has become a policeman's baton.
And as, in the afternoon of
another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
breath of winter, you thread your
way once more through the populous
waters of the noble harbour and make for
the open sea, you look back
upon the receding shore and the range of mighty
battlements. The sun
floods the land you are leaving with light. At this
gateway he is near
his setting, but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is
still in his
morning prime, so vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain
range of
your first impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the
proud
pinnacle that looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or
the
temple of primeval gods points its delicate traceries to the skies.
And
as you gaze you are conscious of a great note of interrogation
taking
shape in the mind. Is that Cathedral of St Woolworth the
authentic
expression of the soul of America, or has this mighty power
you
are leaving another gospel for mankind? And as the light fades
and
battlements and pinnacle merge into the encompassing dark there
sounds
in the mind the echoes of an immortal voice--"Let us here highly
resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation,
under
God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of
the
people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the
earth!"
And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid
farewell
to America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit
of
Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St
Woolworth.
[Illustration: 0217]
[Illustration:
0208]
ON KEYHOLE MORALS
|My neighbour at the breakfast
table complained that he had had a bad
night. What with the gale and the
crash of the seas, and the creaking of
the timbers of the ship and the pair
in the next cabin--especially the
pair in the next cabin.... How they talked!
It was two o'clock
before they sank into silence. And such revelations! He
couldn't help
overhearing them. He was alone in his cabin, and what was he to
do? He
couldn't talk to himself to let them know they were being overheard.
And
he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And, in short, there was
nothing
for it but to overhear. And the things he heard--well.... And with
a
gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he left it to me to imagine
the
worst. I suggested that he might cure the trouble by telling the
steward
to give the couple a hint that the next cabin was occupied. He
received
the idea as a possible way out of a painful and delicate
situation.
Strange, he said, it had not occurred to him.
Whether he
adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
important thing about
him. It would give me the clue to the whole man.
It would tell me whether he
was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper,
and there are few more searching
tests of character than this. We are
not to be catalogued by what we do in
the open. We are all of us proper
enough when we walk abroad and play our
part in society. It is not
our public hearing which reveals the sort of
fellows we are. It only
indicates the kind of fellows we desire the world to
take us to be. We
want the world's good opinion, and when we go out we put on
our company
manners as we put on our best clothes in order to win it. No one
would
put his ear to a keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the
keyhole
behind him watching him in the act. The true estimate of your
character
(and mine) depends on what we should do if we knew there was no
keyhole
behind us. It depends, not on whether you are chivalrous to some
one
else's wife in public, but whether you are chivalrous to your own
wife
in private. The eminent judge who, checking himself in a torrent
of
abuse of his partner at whist, contritely observed, "I beg your
pardon,
madam; I thought you were my wife," did not improve matters. He
only
lifted the curtain of a rather shabby private cabin. He
white-washed
himself publicly out of his dirty private pail.
Or, to
take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
quiet and
undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps
you have
accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the
pockets bulging with
letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental
concern is awakened. It is
not unnatural to be interested in your own
son. It is natural and proper. You
can summon up a score of convincing
and weighty reasons why you should dip
into those letters. You know that
all those respectable reasons would become
disreputable if you heard
young John's step approaching. You know that this
very reasonable
display of paternal interest would suddenly become a mean act
of prying
of which you would be ashamed to be thought capable. But young John
is
miles off--perhaps down in the city, perhaps far away in the
country.
You are left alone with his letters and your own sense of decency.
You
can read the letters in perfect safety. If there are secrets in them
you
can share them. Not a soul will ever find you out. You may be
entitled
to know those secrets, and young John may be benefited by your
knowing
them. What do you do in these circumstances? The answer will provide
you
with a fairly reliable tape measure for your own spiritual
contents.
There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the
next
Cabin. We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of
"Le
Diable Boiteux," Lesage tells how the devil transported him from
one
house to another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on
inside,
with very surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in
the
guise of a very civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening,
and
offered to do the same for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead
and
lift with magic and inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me
the
mysteries and privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should
have
the decency to thank him and send him away. The amusement would
be
purchased at too high a price. It might not do my neighbours any
harm,
but it would do me a lot of harm. For, after all, the important
thing
is not that we should be able, like the honest blacksmith, to look
the
whole world in the face, but that we should be able to look ourselves
in
the face. And it is our private standard of conduct and not our
public
standard of conduct which gives or denies us that privilege. We
are
merely counterfeit coin if our respect for the Eleventh Commandment
only
applies to being found out by other people. It is being found out
by
ourselves that ought to hurt us.
It is the private cabin side of us
that really matters. I could pass
a tolerably good examination on my public
behaviour. I have never
committed a murder, or a burglary. I have never
picked a pocket, or
forged a cheque. But these things are not evidence of
good character.
They may only mean that I never had enough honest indignation
to commit
a murder, nor enough courage to break into a house. They may only
mean
that I never needed to forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may
only
mean that I am afraid of the police. Respect for the law is a
testimonial
that will not go far in the Valley of Jehosophat. The
question that will be
asked of me there is not whether I picked my
neighbour's lock, but whether I
put my ear to his keyhole; not whether
I pocketed the bank note he had left
on his desk, but whether I read his
letters when his back was turned--in
short, not whether I had respect
for the law, but whether I had respect for
myself and the sanctities
that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It
is what went on in my
private cabin which will probably be my
undoing.
[Illustration: 0222]
[Illustration:
0223]
FLEET STREET NO MORE
|To-day I am among the
demobilised. I have put off the harness of a
lifetime and am a person at
large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that
is told, a rumour on the wind; a
memory of far-off things and battles
long ago. At this hour I fancy it is
getting into its nightly paroxysm.
There is the thunder of machinery below,
the rattle of linotypes above,
the click-click-click of the tape machine, the
tapping of telegraph
operators, the tinkling of telephones, the ringing of
bells for
messengers who tarry, reporters coming in with "stories" or
without
"stories," leader-writers writing for dear life and wondering
whether
they will beat the clock and what will happen if they don't,
night
editors planning their pages as a shopman dresses his shop
window,
sub-editors breasting the torrent of "flimsies" that flows in from
the
ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and the other. I
hear
the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit might hear
the
murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as a
policeman
must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the
Strand
submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his
glory
departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in
the
middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the
visible
embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the
strong
arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand
and
the waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was
a
personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He
could
stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross
the
street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk
to
the cook through the area railings without suspicion of
impropriety.
His cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars
of
the Constitution, and his truncheon was as indispensable as
a
field-marshal's baton.
And now he is even as one of the crowd that
he had ruled, a saunterer on
the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible
wayfarer. No longer can he make
a pathway through the torrent of the Strand
for the nurse-maid to walk
across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal
converse with ex-Ministers.
Even "J. B.," who has never been known to pass a
policeman without a
gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who
had once lived
under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in
Piccadilly
Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the
gates
or in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this
vanished
magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is
free,
independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions.
He
can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his
hand,
but he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or
Tooting,
or Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look
in
the shop windows, or turn into the "pictures" or go home to tea. He
can
light his pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long
as
he pleases. He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to
a
realm where the clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it
likes
without stirring his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he
will
not care.
And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my
fingers at the clock
and take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long
years that famous
thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been
familiar to me
as my own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager,
jostling life
until I have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I
have
heard its chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with
the
swanking swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of
its
unceasing life during every hour of the twenty-four--in the
afternoon
when the pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers
are
crossing to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the
air
is shrill with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the
tide
of the day's life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to
work,
and the telegraph boys flit from door to door with their tidings
of
the world's happenings; in the small hours when the great lorries
come
thundering up the side streets with their mountains of papers and
rattle
through the sleeping city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the
flag
of morn in sovereign state floats over the dome of the great
Cathedral
that looks down so grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. "I
see it
arl so plainly as I saw et, long ago." I have worn its paving stones
as
industriously as Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies
as
one who had the run of the estate and the freeman's right. I have
known
its _habitues_ as familiarly as if they had belonged to my own
household, and
its multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have
drunk the solemn
toast with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken
counsel with the
lawyers in the Temple, and wandered in its green and
cloistered calm in the
hot afternoons, and written thousands of leaders
and millions of words on
this, that, and the other, wise words and
foolish words, and words without
any particular quality at all, except
that they filled up space, and have had
many friendships and fought many
battles, winning some and losing others, and
have seen the generations
go by, and the young fellows grow into old fellows
who scan a little
severely the new race of ardent boys that come along so
gaily to the
enchanted street and are doomed to grow old and weary in its
service
also. And at the end it has come to be a street of ghosts--a street
of
memories, with faces that I knew lurking in its shadows and
peopling
its rooms and mingling with the moving pageant that seems like a
phantom
too.
Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with
the rest. Like
the Chambered Nautilus, I=
````... seal up the idle
door,
``Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.=
I
may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape
at its
wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no
more. No more
shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual
footsteps. No more
shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had
always "gone out to supper,
sir," or been called to the news-room or
sent on an errand. No more shall I
cower nightly before that tyrannous
clock that ticked so much faster than I
wrote. The galley proofs will
come down from above like snow, but I shall not
con them. The tumults
of the world will boil in like the roar of many waters,
but I shall not
hear them. For I have come into the inheritance of leisure.
Time, that
has lorded it over me so long, is henceforth my slave, and the
future
stretches before me like an infinite green pasture in which I can
wander
till the sun sets. I shall let the legions thunder by while I
tend
my bees and water my plants, and mark how my celery grows and how
the
apples ripen.
And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old
book, or in the
chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one
from the great
noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall
tell him
a tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in
his
orchard when there came to him from the distant capital two
envoys,
bearing an urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place
in
the Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely
to
their plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of
water,
took a sponge _and washed out his ears._
[Illustration:
0228]
[Illustration: 0229]
ON WAKING UP
|When I
awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the
valley and the
beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and
heard the ducks
clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly
intimacies of life
coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt,
as the Americans say, "good."
Waking up is always--given a clear
conscience, a good digestion, and a
healthy faculty of sleep--a joyous
experience. It has the pleasing excitement
with which the tuning up of
the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the
symphony affects you. It is
like starting out for a new adventure, or coming
into an unexpected
inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling suddenly
upon some author
whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes to your
heart like a
brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden and
beautiful and
full of promise.
But waking up can never have been quite
so intoxicating a joy as it is
now that peace has come back to the earth. It
is in the first burst of
consciousness that you feel the full measure of the
great thing that has
happened in the world. It is like waking from an
agonising nightmare and
realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it
was not true. The
fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was
true does
not diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it
into
the future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on
awaking
to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is
over,
that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is
shining
and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are
going
forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without
hate.
As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and
find
it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that
moment
when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world
the
revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has
passed.
The devil is dead. The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to
the
earth. You recall the far different emotions of a few brief months
ago
when the morning sun woke you with a sinister smile, and the
carolling
of the birds seemed pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in
the
paper spoiled your breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not
the
Kaiser. Poor wretch, he is waking, too, probably about this time
and
wondering what will happen to him before nightfall, wondering where
he
will spend the miserable remnant of his days, wondering whether his
great
ancestor's habit of carrying a dose of poison was not after all a
practice
worth thinking about. He wanted the whole, earth, and now he is
discovering
that he is entitled to just six feet of it--the same as the lowliest peasant in
his land. "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests," but there
is neither hole nor nest where he will be welcome. There is not much joy for him
in waking to a new day. |
|
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