Part 10

“Ah! there you have a pigeon who has less complacency than any living thing. You see, it depends on circumstances. Suppose, for instance, that we happened to keep Our Selves--perhaps the most complacent class of human beings--in a large space enclosed by iron railings, feeding them up carefully, until their natural instincts caused them to run up and down at a considerable speed from side to side of the enclosure. And suppose when we noticed that they had attained the full speed and strength of their legs we took them out, holding them gingerly in order that they might not become exhausted by struggling, and placed them in little tin compartments so dark and stuffy that they would not care of their own accord to stay there, and then stood back about thirty paces with a shot gun and pressed a spring which let the tin compartment collapse. And then, as each one of Our Selves ran out, we let fly with the right barrel and peppered him in the tail, whereon, if he fell, we sent a dog out to fetch him in by the slack of his breeches, and after holding him idly for a minute by the neck we gave it a wring round; or, if he did not fall, we prayed Heaven at once and let fly with the left barrel. Do you think in these circumstances Our Selves would be complacent?”

“Don’t be absurd!” I said.

“Very well,” he replied, “I will come to ‘blue rocks’--do you still maintain that they are so complacent as to deserve their fate?”

“I don’t know--I know nothing about their fate.”

“What the eyes do not swallow, the heart does not throw up! There are other places, but--have you been to Monte Carlo?”

“No, and I should never think of going there.”

“Oh, well,” he answered, “it’s a great place; but there’s just one little thing about it, and that’s in the matter of those ‘blue rocks.’ You’ll agree, I suppose, that one can’t complain of people amusing themselves in any way they like so long as they hurt no one but themselves----”

I caught him up: “I don’t agree at all.”

He smiled: “Yours is perhaps the English point of view. Still----”

“It’s more important that they shouldn’t hurt themselves than that they shouldn’t hurt pigeons, if that’s what you’re driving at,” I said.

“There wouldn’t appear to you, I suppose, to be any connection in the matter?”

“I tell you,” I repeated, “I know nothing about pigeon-shooting!”

He stared very straight before him.

“Imagine,” he said, “a blue sea, and a half-circle of grass, with a low wall. Imagine on that grass five traps, from which lead paths--like the rays of a star--to the central point on the base of that half-circle. And imagine on that central point a gentleman with a double-barrelled gun, another man, and a retriever dog. And imagine one of those traps opening, and a little dazed grey bird (not a bit like that fellow you saw just now) emerge and fly perhaps six yards. And imagine the sound of the gun and the little bird dipping in its flight, but struggling on. And imagine the sound of the gun again and the little bird falling to the ground and wriggling on along it. And imagine the retriever dog run forward and pick it up and walk slowly back with it, still quivering, in his mouth. Or imagine, once in a way, the little bird drop dead as a stone at the first sound. Or imagine again that it winces at the shots, yet carries on over the boundary, to fall into the sea. Or--but this very seldom--imagine it wing up and out, unhurt, to the first freedom it has ever known. My friend, the joke is this: To the man who lets no little bird away to freedom comes much honour, and a nice round sum of money! Do you still think there is no connection?”

“Well,” I said, “it doesn’t sound too sportsmanlike. And yet, I suppose, looking at it quite broadly, it does minister in a sort of way to the law of the survival of the fittest.”

“In which species--man or pigeon?”

“The sportsman is necessary to the expansion of Empire. Besides, you must remember that one does not expect high standards at Monte Carlo.”

He looked at me. “Do you never read any sporting paper?” he asked.

“No.”

“Did you ever hunt the carted stag?”

“No, I never did.”

“Well, you’ve been coursing, anyway.”

“Certainly; but there’s no comparing that with pigeon-shooting.”

“In coursing I admit,” he said, “there’s pleasure to the dogs, and some chance for the hare, who, besides, is not in captivity. Also that where there is no coursing there are few hares, in these days. And yet----”; he seemed to fall into a reverie.

Then, looking at me in a queer, mournful sort of way, he said suddenly:

“I don’t wish to attack that sport, when there are so many much worse, but by way of showing you how liable all these things are to contribute to the improvement of our species I will tell you a little experience of my own. When I was at college I was in a rather sporting set; we hunted, and played at racing, and loved to be ‘_au courant_’ with all that sort of thing. One year it so happened that the uncle of one of us won the Waterloo Cup with a greyhound whose name was--never mind. We became at once ardent lovers of the sport of coursing, consumed by the desire to hold a Waterloo Cup Meeting in miniature, with rabbits for hares and our own terriers for greyhounds. Well, we held it; sixteen of us nominating our dogs. Now kindly note that of those sixteen eight at least were members of the aristocracy, and all had been at public schools of standing and repute. For the purposes of our meeting, of course, we required fifteen rabbits caught and kept in bags. These we ordered of a local blackguard, with a due margin over to provide against such of the rabbits as might die of fright before they were let out, or be too terrified to run after being loosed. We made the fellow whose uncle had won the Waterloo Cup judge, apportioned among ourselves the other officers, and assembled--the judge on horseback, in case a rabbit might happen to run, say, fifty yards. Assembled with us were many local cads, two fourth-rate bookies, our excited, yapping terriers, and twenty-four bagged rabbits. The course was cleared. Two of us advanced, holding our terriers by the loins; the judge signed that he was ready; the first rabbit was turned down. It crept out of the bag, and squatted, close to the ground, with its ears laid back. The local blackguard stirred it with his foot. It crept two yards, and squatted closer. All the terriers began shrieking their little souls out, all the cads began to yell, but the rabbit did not move--its heart, you see, was broken. At last the local blackguard took it up and wrung its neck. After that some rabbits ran, and some did not, till all were killed! The terrier of one of us was judged victor by him whose uncle had won the Waterloo Cup; and we went back to our colleges to drink everybody’s health. Now, my friend, mark! We were sixteen decent youths, converted by infection into sixteen rabbit-catching cads. Two of us are dead; but the rest of us--what do we think of it now? I tell you this little incident, to confirm you in your feeling that pigeon-shooting, coursing, and the like, tend to improve our species, even here in England.”

§ 3.

Before I could comment on my friend’s narrative we were spattered with mud by passing riders, and stopped to repair the damage to our coats.

“Jolly for my new coat!” I said. “Do you notice, by the way, that they are cutting men’s tails longer this spring? More becoming to a fellow, I think.”

He raised those quizzical eyebrows of his and murmured:

“And horses’ tails shorter. Did you see those that passed just now?”

“No.”

“There were none!”

“Nonsense!” I said. “My dear fellow, you really are obsessed about beasts! They were just ordinary.”

“Quite--a few scrubby hairs, and a wriggle.”

“Now, please,” I said, “don’t begin to talk of the cruelty of docking horses’ tails, and tell me a story of an old horse in a pond.”

“No,” he answered, “for I should have to invent that. What I was going to say was this: Which do you think the greater fools in the matter of fashion--men or women?”

“Oh! Women.”

“Why?”

“There’s always some sense at the bottom of men’s fashions.”

“Even of docking tails?”

“You can’t compare it, anyway,” I said, “with such a fashion as the wearing of ‘aigrettes.’ That’s a cruel fashion if you like.”

“Ah! But you see,” he said, “the women who wear them are ignorant of its cruelty. If they were not, they would never wear them. No gentlewoman wears them, now that the facts have come out.”

“What is that you say?” I remarked.

He looked at me gravely.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, “that any woman of gentle instincts, who _knows_ that the ‘aigrette,’ as they call it, is a nuptial plume sported by the white egret only during the nesting season--and that, in order to obtain it, the mother-birds are shot, and that, after their death, practically all their young die from hunger and exposure--do you mean to tell me that any gentlewoman, knowing that, wears them? Why! most women are mothers themselves! What would they think of gods who shot women with babies in arms for the sake of obtaining their white skins or their crop of hair to wear on their heads, eh?”

“But, my dear fellow,” I said, “you see these plumes about all over the place!”

“Only on people who don’t mind wearing imitation stuff.”

I gaped at him.

“You need not look at me like that,” he said. “A woman goes into a shop. She knows that real ‘aigrettes’ mean, killing mother-birds and starving all their nestlings. Therefore, if she’s a real gentlewoman she doesn’t ask for a real ‘aigrette.’ But still less does she ask to be supplied with an imitation article so good that people will take her for the wearer of the real thing. I put it to you, would she want to be known as an encourager of such a practice? You can never have seen a _lady_ wearing an ‘aigrette.’”

“What!” I said. “What?”

“So much for the woman who knows about ‘aigrettes,’” he went on. “Now for the woman who doesn’t. Either, when she is told these facts about ‘aigrettes’ she sets them down as ‘hysterical stuff,’ or she is simply too ‘out of it’ to know anything. Well, she goes in and asks for an ‘aigrette.’ Do you think they sell her the real thing--I mean, of course, in England--knowing that it involves the shooting of mother-birds at breeding time? I put it to you: Would they?”

His inability to grasp the real issues astonished me, and I said:

“You and I happen to have read the evidence about ‘aigrettes’ and the opinion of the House of Lords Committee that the feathers of egrets imported into Great Britain are obtained by killing the birds during the breeding season; but you don’t suppose, do you, that people whose commercial interests are bound up with the selling of ‘aigrettes’ are going to read it, or believe it if they do read it?”

“That,” he answered, “is cynical, if you like. I feel sure that, in England, people do not sell suspected articles about which there has been so much talk and inquiry as there has been about ‘aigrettes’ without examining in good faith into the facts of their origin. No, believe me, none of the ‘aigrettes’ sold in England can have grown on birds.”

“This is fantastic,” I said. “Why! if what you’re saying is true, then--then real ‘aigrettes’ are all artificial; but that--that would be cheating!”

“Oh, no!” he said. “You see, ‘aigrettes’ are in fashion. The word ‘real’ has therefore become parliamentary. People don’t want to be cruel, but they must have ‘real’ aigrettes. So, all these ‘aigrettes’ are ‘real,’ unless the customer has a qualm, and then they are ‘real imitation aigrettes.’ We are a highly civilised people!”

“That is very clever,” I said, “but how about the statistics of real egret plumes imported into this country?”

He answered like a flash: “Oh, those, of course, are only brought here to be exported again at once to countries where they do not mind confessing to cruelty; yes, all exported, except--well, _those that aren’t_!”

“Oh!” I said: “I see! You have been speaking ironically all this time.”

“Have you grasped that?” he answered. “Capital!” After that we walked in silence.

“The fact is,” I said, presently, “ordinary people, shopmen and customers alike, never bother their heads about such things at all.”

“Yes,” he replied sadly, “they take the line of least resistance. It is just that which gives Fashion its chance to make such fools of them.”

“You have yet to prove that it does make fools of them.”

“I thought I had; but no matter. Take horses’ tails--what’s left of them--do you defend that fashion?”

“Well,” I said, “I----”

“Would you if you were a horse?”

“If you mean that I am a donkey----?”

“Oh, no! Not at all!”

“It’s going too far,” I said, “to call docking cruel.”

“Personally,” he answered, “I don’t think it is going too far. It’s painful in itself, and Heaven alone knows what irritation horses have to suffer from flies through being tailless. I admit that it saves a little brushing, and that some people are under the delusion that it averts carriage accidents. But put cruelty and utility aside, and look at it from the point of view of fashion. Can anybody say it doesn’t spoil a horse’s looks?”

“You know perfectly well,” I said, “that many people think it smartens him up tremendously. They regard a certain kind of horse as nothing with a tail; just as some men are nothing with beards.”

“The parallel with man does not hold, my friend. We are not shaved--with or against our wills--by demi-gods!”

“Exactly! And isn’t that in itself an admission that we are superior to beasts, and have a right to some say in their appearance?”

“I will not,” he answered, “for one moment allow that men are superior to horses in point of looks. Take yourself, or any other personable man, and stand him up against a thoroughbred and ask your friends to come and look. How much of their admiration do you think you will get?”

It was not the sort of question I could answer.

“I am not speaking at random,” he went on; “I have seen the average lord walking beside the average winner of the Derby.” He cackled disagreeably.

“But it’s just on this point of looks that people defend docking,” I said. “They breed the horses, and have a right to their own taste. Many people dislike long swishy appendages.”

“And bull-terriers, or Yorkshires, or Great Danes, with natural ears; and fox-terriers and spaniels with uncut tails; and women with merely the middles so small as Nature gave them?”

“If you’re simply going to joke----”

“I never was more serious. The whole thing is of a piece, and summed up in the word ‘smart,’ which you used just now. That word, sir, is the guardian angel of all fashions, and if you don’t mind my saying so, fashions are the guardian angels of vulgarity. Now, a horse is not a vulgar animal, and I can never get away from the thought that to dock his tail must hurt his feelings of refinement.”

“Well, if that’s all, I dare say he’ll get over it.”

“But will the man who does it?”

“You must come with me to the Horse Show,” I said, “and look at the men who have to do with horses; then you’ll know if such a thing as docking the tails of these creatures can do them harm or not. And, by the way, you talk of refinement and vulgarity. What is your test? Where is the standard? It’s all a matter of taste.”

“You want me to define these things?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Very well! Do you believe in what we call the instincts of a gentleman?”

“Of course.”

“Such as--the instinct to be self-controlled; not to be rude or intolerant; not to ‘slop-over’; not to fuss, nor to cry out; to hold your head up, so that people refrain from taking liberties; to be ready to do things for others, to be chary of asking others to do things for you, and grateful when they do them?”

“Yes,” I said, “all these I believe in.”

“What central truth do you imagine that these instincts come from?”

“Well, they’re all such a matter of course--I don’t think I ever considered.”

“If by any chance,” he replied, “you ever do, you will find they come from an innate worship of balance, of the just mean; an inborn reverence for due proportion, a natural sense of harmony and rhythm, and a consequent mistrust of extravagance. What is a bounder? Just a man without sufficient sense of proportion to know that he is not so important in the scheme of things as he thinks he is!”

“You are right there!”

“Very well. Refinement is a quality of the individual who has--and conforms to--a true (not a conventional) sense of proportion; and vulgarity is either the natural conduct of people without that sense of proportion, or of people who imitate and reproduce the tricks of refinement wholesale, without any real feeling for proportion; or again, it is mere conscious departure from the sense of proportion for the sake of cutting a dash.”

“Ah!” I said; “and to which of these kinds of vulgarity is the fashion of docking horses’ tails a guardian angel?”

“Imagine,” he answered gravely, “that you dock your horse’s tail. You are either horribly deficient in feeling for a perfectly proportioned horse, or you imitate what you believe--goodness knows why--to be the refined custom of docking horses’ tails, without considering the question of proportion at all.”

“Yes,” I said; “but what makes so many people do it, if there isn’t something in it, either useful or ornamental?”

“Because people as a rule do not love proportion; they love the grotesque. You have only to look at their faces, which are very good indications of their souls.”

“You have begged the question,” I said. “Who are you to say that the perfect horse is not the horse----?”

“With the imperfect tail?”

“Imperfect? Again, you’re begging.”

“As Nature made it, then. Oh!” he went on with vehemence, “think of the luxury of having your own tail. Think of the cool swish of it. Think of the real beauty of it! Think of the sheer hideousness of all that great front balanced behind by a few scrub hairs and a wriggle! It became ‘smart’ to dock horses’ tails; and smart to wear ‘aigrettes.’ ‘Smart’--‘neat’--‘efficient’--for all except the horse and the poor egrets.”

“Your argument,” I said, “is practically nothing but æsthetics.”

He fixed his eyes upon my hat.

“Well,” he said slowly. “I admit that neither on horse nor on man would long tails go at all well with that bowler hat of yours. Odd how all of a piece taste is! From a man’s hat, or a horse’s tail, we can reconstruct the age we live in, like that scientist, you remember, who reconstructed a mastodon from its funny-bone.”

The thought went sharply through my head: Is his next tirade to be on mastodons? Till I remembered with relief that the animal was extinct, at all events in England.

§ 4.

With but little further talk we had nearly reached my rooms, when he said abruptly:

“A lark! Can’t you hear it? Over there, in that wretched little goldfish shop again.”

But I could only hear the sounds of traffic.

“It’s your imagination,” I said. “It really is too lively on the subject of birds and beasts.”

“I tell you,” he persisted, “there’s a caged lark there. Very likely half-a-dozen.”

“My dear fellow,” I said, “suppose there are! We could go and buy them and set them free, but it would only encourage the demand. Or we could assault the shopmen. Do you recommend that?”

“I don’t joke on this subject,” he answered shortly.

“But surely,” I said, “if we can’t do anything to help the poor things we had better keep our ears from hearing.”

“And our eyes shut? Suppose we all did that, what sort of world should we be living in?”

“Very much the same as now, I expect.”

“Blasphemy! Rank, hopeless blasphemy!”

“Please don’t exaggerate!”

“I am not. There is only one possible defence of that attitude, and it’s this: The world is--and was deliberately meant to be--divided into two halves: the half that suffers and the half that benefits by that suffering.”

“Well?”

“Is it so?”

“Perhaps.”

“You acquiesce in that definition of the world’s nature? Very well, if you belong to the first half you are a poor-spirited creature, consciously acquiescing in your own misery. If to the second, you are a brute, consciously acquiescing in your own happiness, at the expense of others. Well, which are you?”

“I have not said that I belong to either.”

“There are only two halves to a whole. No, my friend, disabuse yourself once for all of that cheap and comfortable philosophy of shutting your eyes to what you think you can’t remedy, unless you are willing to be labelled ‘brute.’ ‘He who is not with me is against me,’ you know.”

“Well,” I said, “after that, perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me what I can do by making myself miserable over things I can’t help?”

“I will,” he answered. “In the first place, kindly consider that you are not living in a private world of your own. Everything you say and do and think has its effect on everybody around you. For example, if you feel, and say loudly enough, that it is an infernal shame to keep larks and other wild song-birds in cages, you will infallibly infect a number of other people with that sentiment, and in course of time those people who feel as you do will become so numerous that larks, thrushes, blackbirds, and linnets will no longer be caught and kept in cages. Whereas, if you merely think: ‘Oh! this is dreadful, quite too dreadful, but, you see, I can do nothing; therefore consideration for myself and others demands that I shall stop my ears and hold my tongue,’ then, indeed, nothing will ever be done, and larks, blackbirds, etc., will continue to be caught and prisoned. How do you imagine it ever came about that bears and bulls and badgers are no longer baited; cocks no longer openly encouraged to tear each other in pieces; donkeys no longer beaten to a pulp? Only by people going about and shouting out that these things made them uncomfortable. How did it come about that more than half the population of this country are not still classed as ‘serfs’ under the law? Simply because a few of our ancestors were made unhappy by seeing their fellow-creatures owned and treated like dogs, and roundly said so--in fact, were not ashamed to be sentimental humanitarians like me.”

“That is all obvious. But my point is that there is moderation in all things, and a time for everything.”

“By your leave,” he said, “there is little moderation desirable when we are face to face with real suffering, and, as a general rule, no time like the present.”

“But there is, as you were saying just now, such a thing as a sense of proportion. I cannot see that it’s my business to excite myself about the caging of larks when there are so many much greater evils.”

“Forgive my saying so,” he answered, “but if, when a caged lark comes under your nose, excitement does not take hold of you, with or against your will, there is mighty little chance of your getting excited about anything. For, consider what it means to be a caged lark--what pining and misery for that little creature, which only lives for its life up in the blue. Consider what blasphemy against Nature, and what an insult to all that is high and poetic in man, it is to cage such an exquisite thing of freedom!”

“You forget that it is done out of love for the song--to bring it into towns where people can’t otherwise hear it.”

“It is done for a living--and that people without imagination may squeeze out of unhappy creatures a little gratification!”

“It is not a crime to have no imagination.”

“No, sir; but neither is the lack of it a thing to pride oneself on, or pass by in silence, when it inflicts suffering.”

“I am not defending the custom of caging larks.”

“No; but you are responsible for its continuance.”

“I?”

“You and all those other people who believe in minding their own business.”

“Really,” I said; “you must not attack people on that ground. We cannot all be busybodies!”