Part 5

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.

“I’d like to get one here on a snowy winter’s day, when ye’ve to find your way by sound and smell; there’s things up here they wouldn’t make so free with. They say from London ye can get to anywhere. But there’s things no man can ride away from. Downs ’ll be left when they’re all gone.... Never been off the Downs meself.”

“Don’t you ever feel you’d like to go?”

“There isn’t not hardly one as knows what these Downs are. I see the young men growin’ up, but they won’t stay on ’em; I see folk comin’ down, same as yourself, to look at ’em.”

“What _are_ they, then--these Downs?”

His little eyes, that saw so vastly better than my eyes, deepened in his walnut-coloured face. Fixed on those grey-green Downs, that reigned serene above the country spread below in all its little fields, and woods, and villages, they answered for him. It was long before he spoke.

“Healthiest spot in England!... Talkin’ you was of progress; but look at bacon--four times the price now that ever it was when I were young. And families--thirteen we had, my missus and meself; nowadays if they have three or four it’s as much as ever they’ll put up with. The country’s changed.”

“Does that surprise you? When you came up here this morning the sun was just behind that clump of beech--it’s travelled on since then.”

He looked at it.

“There’s no puttin’ of it back, I guess, if that’s your meaning? It were risin’ then, an’ now it’s gone past noon.”

“Joshua made the sun stand still; it was a great achievement!”

“May well say that; won’t never be done again, I’m thinkin’. And as to knowin’ o’ the time o’ day, them ewes they know it better than ever humans do; at tew o’clock exact you’ll see them comin’ out again to feed.”

“Ah! well--I must be getting on. Good-bye!”

His little eyes began to twinkle with a sort of friendly mockery.

“Ye’re like the country, all for movin’ on your way! Well, keep on, along the tops--ye can’t make no mistake!”

He gave me his old gnarled hand, whose finger-tips were so strangely warped. Then, leaning on his stick, he fixed his eyes upon the beech grove, where his ewes were lying in the cool.

Beyond him in the sun the hazy line of dust trailed across the grey-green Downs, and on the rising breeze came the far-off music of the cars.

HOLIDAY

X

HOLIDAY

The curtain whose colour changes from dawn to noon, from night to dawn--the curtain which never lifts, is fastened to the dark horizon.

On the black beach, beneath a black sky with its few stars, the sea wind blows a troubling savour from the west, as it did when man was not yet on the earth. It sings the same troubling song as when the first man heard it. And by this black beach man is collected in his hundreds, trying with all his might to take his holiday. Here he has built a theatre within the theatre of the night, and hung a canvas curtain to draw up and down, and round about lit lights to show him as many as may be of himself, and nothing of the encircling dark. Here he has brought singers, and put a band, armed with pipes of noise, to drown the troubling murmur of the wind. And behind his theatre he has made a fire whose smoke has qualified the troubling savour of the sea.

Male and female, from all the houses where he sleeps, he has herded to this music as close as he can herd. The lights fall on his faces, attentive, white, and still--as wonderfully blank as bits of wood cut out in round, with pencil marks for eyes. And every time the noises cease, he claps his hands as though to say: “Begin again, you noises; do not leave me lonely to the silence and the sighing of the night.”

Round the ring he circles, and each small group of him seems saying: “Talk--laugh--this is my holiday!”

This is his holiday, his rest from the incessant round of toil that fills his hours; to this he has looked forward all the year; to this he will look back until it comes again. He walks and talks and laughs, around this pavilion by the beach; he casts no glances at the pavilion of the night, where Nature is playing her wind-music for the stars to dance. Long ago he found he could not bear his mother Nature’s inscrutable, ironic face, bending above him in the dark, and with a moan he drew the clothes over his head. In Her who gave him being he has perceived the only thing he cannot brave. And since there is courage and pride in the feeblest of his hearts, he has made a compact with himself: “Nature! There is no Nature! For what I cannot understand I cannot face, and what I cannot face I will not think of, and what I will not think of does not exist for me; thus, there is nothing that I cannot face. And--deny it as I may--this is why I herd in my pavilion under my lights, and make these noises against the sighing and the silence and the blackness of the night.”

Back from the dark sea, across a grassy space, is his row of houses with lighted windows; and behind it, stretching inland, a thousand more, huddled, closer and closer, round the lighted railway shed, where, like spider’s threads, the rails run in from the expanse of sleeping fields and marshes and dim hills; of dark trees and moon-pale water fringed with reeds. All over the land these rails have run, chaining his houses into one great web so that he need never be alone.

For nothing is so dreadful to this man as solitude. In solitude he hears the voice of Her he cannot understand: “Ah! the baby that you are, my baby man!” And he sees Her smile, the ironic smile of evening over land and sea. In solitude he feels so small, so very small; for solitude is silence and silence irony, and irony he cannot bear, not even that of Her who gave him birth.

And so he is neither careful of his beauty nor of his strength; not careful to be clean or to be fine; his only care is not to be alone. To all his young, from the first day, he teaches the same lesson: Dread Her! Avoid Her! Look not on Her! Towns! more towns! There you can talk and listen to your fellows’ talk! Crowd into the towns; the eyes in your whitened faces need never see Her there! Fill every cranny of your houses so that no moment of silence or of solitude can come to any one of you. And if, by unhappy chance, in their parks you find yourself alone, lie neither on your back, for then you will see the quiet sunlight on the leaves, the quiet clouds, and birds with solitude within their wings; nor on your face, or you will catch the savour of the earth, and a faint hum, and for a minute live the life of tiny things that straddle in the trodden grasses. Fly from such sights and scents and sounds, for fear lest terror for your fate should visit you; fly to the streets; fly to your neighbours’ houses; talk, and be brave! Or if, and such times will come, your feet and brain and tongue are tired, then sleep! For, next to the drug of fellowship is the anodyne of slumber! And when it is your holiday, and time is all your own, be warned! The lot of those few left among you who are forced to live alone--on the sea, with the sheep of the green hills, guarding the trim wildness of your woods, turning the lonely soil--may for a moment seem desirable. Be sure it is not; the thought has come to you from books! Go to a spot where, though the nights are clear and the sun burns hot, the sea wind smells of salt, and the land wind smells of hay, you can avoid Her, huddled in your throngs! Dread Her! Fly from Her! Hide from Her smile, that seems to say: “Once, when you lived with me, you were a little gentleman. You looked in my eyes and learned a measure of repose, learned not to whimper at the dark, giggle, and jeer, and chatter through your nose, learned to hold yourself up, to think your own thoughts, and be content. And now you have gone from me to be a little cockney man. But for all your airs of courage and your fear of me--I shall get you back!” Dread Her! Avoid Her! Towns, more towns!

Such is the lesson man teaches, from the very birth, to every child of his unstinted breeding. And well he teaches it. Of all his thousands here to-night, drawn from his crowded, evil-smelling towns, not one has gone apart on this black beach to spend a single minute with his shadow and the wind and stars. His laughter fills the air, his ceaseless chatter, songs, and fiddling, the clapping of his hands; so will it be throughout his holiday.

And who so foolish as to say it is not good that man should talk and laugh and clap his hands; who so blind as not to see that these are antidotes to evils that his one great fear has brought to him? This ring of him with vacant faces and staring eyes round that anæmic singer with the worn-out voice, or the stout singer with the voice of brass, is but an instance of Her irony: “This, then, is the medicine you have mixed, my little man, to cure the pain of your fevered souls. Well done! But if you had not left me you would have had no fever! There is none in the wind and the stars and the rhythm of the sea; there is none in green growth or fallen leaves; in my million courses it is not found. Fever is fear--to you alone, my restless mannikin, has fever come, and this is why, even in your holiday, you stand in your sick crowds gulping down your little homœopathic draughts!”

The show is over. The pipes of noise are still, the lights fall dark, and man is left by the black beach with nothing to look on but the sky, or hear but the beat of wave-wings flighting on the sea. And suddenly in threes and fours he scurries home, lest for one second he should see Her face whose smile he cannot bear.

FACTS

XI

FACTS

Each morning a noise of poured-out water revived him from that state in which his thoughts were occasionally irregular. Raising his face, with its regular nose above a regular moustache just going grey, he asked the time. Each morning he received the same answer, and would greet it with a yawn. Without this opening to his day he would not have known for certain that it had begun. Assured of the fact, he would leap from his bed into his bath, and sponge himself with cold, clear water. “Straight out of bed--never lose heat!” Such was his saying; and he would maintain it against every other theory of the morning tub. It was his own discovery--a fact on which, as on all facts, he set much store; and every morning he kept his mind fixed on its value. Then, in that underclothing, of which he said, “Never wear any other--lets the skin act!” he would take his stand in a chosen light before a glass, dipping in boiling water a razor on which was written the day’s name, and without vanity inspect his face to see that it preserved its shade of faintly mottled red against the encroachments of the town. Then, with a slanting edge--“Always shave slanting”--he would remove such hairs as seemed to him unnecessary. If he caught himself thinking, he would go to a bottle on the washstand and pour out a little bitter water, which he would drink; then, seizing a pair of Indian clubs, he would wave them. “I believe in Indian clubs!” he often said. Tying his tie at the angle he had tied it for nearly thirty years, and placing lavender water--the only scent he ever used--about his handkerchief, he would open his wife’s door, and say, “How are you, my dear?” Without waiting for an answer he would shut it, and go down.

His correspondence was set out on his writing-table, and as he was not a stupid man he soon disposed of it; then, with his daily paper--which he had long selected out of every other--he would stand before the hearth, reading, and believing that the news he read was of a definite importance. He took care that this reading should not stimulate his thoughts. He wanted facts, and the fact that the day’s facts were swallowed by the morrow’s did not disturb him, for the more facts he read the better he was pleased.

After his breakfast--eaten opposite his wife, and ended with some marmalade--he would go forth at ten o’clock, and walk the two miles to the Temple. He believed in walking, wet or fine, for, as he said: “It keeps your liver acting!”

On his way he would think of many things, such as: Whether to lay down Gruaud La Rose, 1900, or Château Margaux, 1899? And, though alive to its importance, he would soon decide this question, since indecision was repugnant to his nature. He walked by way of the Green Park and Thames Embankment, expanding his chest quietly, and feeling inward satisfaction. To the crossing-sweeper nearest to Big Ben he gave on every day, save Saturdays, a nod, and on Saturdays sixpence; and, because he thus assisted him, he believed the man to be worthy of assistance. He passed all other crossing-sweepers without being conscious of their presence; and if they had asked for pennies would have put them down as lazy persons making an illicit living. They did not ask, however, accepting his attitude towards them as correct, from the vigour of its regularity. He walked always at the same pace, neither fast nor slow, his head erect, looking before him with an air of: I am getting there; this is salubrious!

And on getting there he looked at his watch--not because he did not know what it would tell him, but to satisfy his craving for the ascertainment of a fact. It took, he knew, thirty-two minutes between door and door.

Up the stone staircase he would pause half-way and glance through the window at a certain tree. A magpie had once built there. It had been gone now fifteen years, but the peculiar fact remained. Meeting his clerk in the dark narrow passage beyond the oaken door, he would address the young man thus: “Mornin’, Dyson. Anything fresh?” and pass on into his light and airy room, with its faint scent of Law Reports. Here, in an old Norfolk jacket, a meerschaum pipe, rarely alight, between his teeth, he would remain seated before papers of all sorts, working hard, and placing facts in order, ready for the conclusions of his chief, a man of genius, but devoid of regularity.

At one o’clock he would go out and walk some little way to lunch. When tempted to go elsewhere he would say, “No, no! Come with me; better grub at Sim’s!” He knew this for a fact--no novelty of any kind could alter it. Cigar in mouth, he would then walk for twenty minutes in the Temple Gardens, his hands behind his back, alone or with some friend, and his good-humoured laugh would frequently be heard--the laugh of a fat man; for though by careful weighing he kept his body thin, he could not weigh his soul, and having thus no facts to go by, could never check its bulk.

From two to four he would continue the arrangement of his facts, and on the rising of the Courts place them before his chief. Strong in his power of seeing them as facts with no disturbing relevance to other things, he would show a shade of patronage to that disorderly distinguished man. Then, washing with Pears’ soap, and saying to his clerk, “Evenin’, Dyson; nothing that won’t keep,” he would take his umbrella and walk west. And again he would reflect on many things, such as: Whether to use the iron or cleek for the approach to that last hole? and would soon decide on one or on the other.

Passing the portals of his Club, of which he used to say, “I’ve belonged here twenty years; that shows you!” he would hang his hat upon a certain peg and go into the card-room, where, for small stakes that never varied, he played the game of Bridge till seven o’clock. Then in a hansom cab he would go home resting body and brain, and looking straight before him at the backs of cabs in front. Entering his drawing-room he would go over to his wife, kiss her, and remark: “Well, old girl, what have you been doing?” and at once relate what he himself had done, finishing thus: “Time to dress for dinner! I’ve got a twist!” In a white tie and swallow-tail if they were dining out, a black tie and tail-less coat if they were dining in--for these were the proved facts of suitability--he would go to his wife’s room, take up one of her toilet bottles, examine the stamp on it, and tell her his programme for the morrow.

His habits in dining out were marked by regularity. A sweet or ice he never touched for fear of gout, of which he had felt twinges. He drank brandy with his coffee, not for fear of sleeplessness, which he had never had, but because he found it adjusted preceding facts more nicely than liqueurs; after champagne he would consume a glass or two of port. Some men drank claret, believing that it did less harm, but he would say: “Port after champagne--proved it a dozen times.” For, though it was really not important to his body which he drank, it concerned his soul to make the choice, and place importance on it. When the ladies had withdrawn, he would talk on the facts of politics and guns, of stocks and women; and, chiefly in the form of stories--facts about facts. To any one who linked these facts to an idea he would remark at once: “Exactly!” and, staring slightly, restore order with another fact. At last he would go home, and in the cab would touch his wife to see that she was there.