Part 2

BEING a household of moderate attainments, and not being at all superior people, we were gravely concerned on learning that it was our duty to entertain the distinguished scholar, for our pride was chastened by anxiety and we had once received moderators. His name was carried far and wide on the wings of fame, and even learned people referred to him with a reverence in the tone, because it was supposed there was almost nothing within the range of languages and philosophy and theology which he did not know, and that if there happened to be any obscure department he had not yet overtaken, he would likely be on the way to its conquest. We speculated what like he would be--having only heard rumours--and whether he would be strangely clothed, we discussed what kind of company we could gather to meet such a man, and whether we ought, that is the two trembling heads of the household, to read up some subject beforehand that we might be able at least to know where he was if we could not follow him. And we were haunted with the remembrance of a literary woman who once condescended to live with us for two days, and whose conversation was so exhausting that we took it in turns like the watch on board ship, one standing on the bridge with the spin-drift of quotations flying over his head, and the other snatching a few minutes' sleep to strengthen her for the storm. That overwhelming lady was only the oracle of a circle after all, but our coming visitor was known to the ends of the earth.

It was my place to receive him at the station, and pacing up and down the platform, I turned over in my mind appropriate subjects for conversation in the cab, and determined to lure the great man into a discussion of the work of an eminent Oxford philosopher which had just been published, and which I knew something about. I had just arranged a question which I intended to submit for his consideration, when the express came in, and I hastened down the first-class carriages to identify the great man. High and mighty people, clothed in purple and fine linen, or what corresponds to such garments in our country, were descending in troops with servants and porters waiting upon them, but there was no person that suggested a scholar. Had he, in the multitude of his thoughts, forgotten his engagement altogether, or had he left the train at some stopping-place and allowed it to go without him--anything is possible with such a learned man.

Then I saw a tall and venerable figure descend from a third-class compartment and a whole company of genuine “third classers” handing out his luggage while he took the most affectionate farewell of them. A working man got out to deposit the scholar's Gladstone bag upon the platform while his wife passed out his umbrella, and another working man handled delicately a parcel of books. The scholar shook hands with every one of his fellow-passengers including children, and then I presented myself, and looked him in the face. He was rather over six feet in height, and erect as a sapling, dressed in old-fashioned and well brushed black clothes, and his face placed me immediately at ease, for though it was massive and grave, with deep lines and crowned with thick white hair, his eyes were so friendly and sincere, had such an expression of modesty and affection, that even then, and on the first experience, I forgot the gulf between us. Next instant, and almost before I had mentioned my name he seized me by the hand, and thanked me for my coming.

“This, my good sir,” he said with his old-fashioned courtesy, “is a kindness which I never for an instant anticipated, and when I remember your many important engagements (important!) and the sacrifice which this gracious act (gracious!) must have entailed upon you, I feel this to be an honour, sir, for which you will accept this expression of gratitude.” It seemed as if there must have been something wrong in our imagination of a great man's manner, and when he insisted, beyond my preventing, in carrying his bag himself, and would only allow me with many remonstrances to relieve him of the books; when I had difficulty in persuading him to enter a cab because he was anxious to walk to our house, our fancy portrait had almost disappeared. Before leaving the platform he had interviewed the guard and thanked him by both word and deed for certain “gracious and mindful attentions in the course of the journey.”

My wife acknowledged that she had been waiting to give the great man afternoon tea in fear and trembling, but there was something about him so winsome that she did not need even to study my face, but felt at once that however trying writing-women and dilletante critics might be, one could be at home with a chief scholar. When I described the guests who were coming--to meet him at dinner--such eminent persons as I could gather--he was overcome by the trouble we had taken, but also alarmed lest he should be hardly fit for their company, being, as he explained himself, a man much restricted in knowledge through the just burden of professional studies. And before he went to his room to dress he had struck up an acquaintance with the youngest member of the family, who seemed to have forgotten that our guest was a very great man, and had visited a family of Japanese mice with evident satisfaction. During dinner he was so conscious of his poverty of attainment in the presence of so many distinguished people that he would say very little, but listened greedily to everything that fell from the lips of a young Oxford man who had taken a fair degree and was omniscient. After dinner we wiled him into a field where very few men have gone, and where he was supposed to know everything that could be known, and then being once started he spoke for forty minutes to our huge delight with such fulness and accuracy of knowledge, with such lucidity and purity of speech--allowing for the old-fashioned style--that even the Oxford man was silent and admired.

Once and again he stopped to qualify his statement of some other scholar's position lest he should have done him injustice, and in the end he became suddenly conscious of the time he had spoken and implored every one's pardon, seeing, as he explained “that the gentlemen present will likely have far more intimate knowledge of this subject than I can ever hope to attain.” He then asked whether any person present had ever seen a family of Japanese mice, and especially whether they had ever seen them waltzing, or as he described it “performing their circular motions of the most graceful and intricate nature, with almost incredible continuance.” And when no one had, he insisted on the company going to visit the menagerie, which was conduct not unbecoming a gentleman, but very unbecoming a scholar.

Next morning, as he was a clergyman, I asked him to take family worship, and in the course of the prayer he made most tender supplication for the sick relative of “one who serves in this household,” and we learned that he had been conversing with the housemaid who attended to his room, having traced some expression of sorrow on her face, and found out that her mother was ill; while we, the heads of the household, had known nothing about the matter, and while we imagined that a scholar would be only distantly aware that a housemaid had a mother. It was plainer than ever that we knew nothing whatever about great scholars. The public function for which he came was an overwhelming success, and after the lapse of now many years people still remember that man of amazing erudition and grandeur of speech. But we, being simple people, and especially a certain lad, who is rapidly coming now to manhood, remember with keen delight how this absurd scholar had hardly finished afternoon tea before he demanded to see the mice, who were good enough to turn out of their nest, a mother and four children, and having rotated, the mother by herself, and the children by themselves, and each one having rotated by itself, all whirled round together in one delirium of delight, partly the delight of the mice and partly of the scholar.

Having moved us all to the tears of the heart by his prayer next morning, for it was as the supplication of a little child, so simple, so confiding, so reverent and affectionate, he bade the whole household farewell, from the oldest to the youngest with a suitable word for each, and he shook hands with the servants, making special inquiry for the housemaid's mother, and--there is no use concealing a scholar's disgrace any more than another man's--he made his last call upon the Japanese mice, and departed bowing at the door, and bowing at the gate of the garden, and bowing before he entered the cab, and bowing his last farewell from the window, while he loaded us all with expressions of gratitude for our “gracious and unbounded hospitality, which had refreshed him alike both in body and mind.” And he declared that he would have both that hospitality and ourselves in “continual remembrance.”

Before we retired to rest I had approached the question of his expenses, although I had an instinct that our scholar would be difficult to handle, and he had waived the whole matter as unworthy of attention. On the way to the station I insisted upon a settlement with the result that he refused to charge any fee, being thankful if his “remarks,” for he refused to give them the name of lecture, had been of any use for the furtherance of knowledge, and as regards expenses they were limited to a third-class return fare. He also explained that there were no other charges, as he travelled in cars and not in cabs, and any gifts he bestowed (by which I understood the most generous tips to every human being that served him in any fashion) were simply a private pleasure of his own. When I established him in the corner seat of a third-class compartment, with his humble luggage above his head, and an Arabic book in his hand, and some slight luncheon for the way in his pocket, he declared that he was going to travel as a prince. Before the train left an old lady opposite him in the carriage--I should say a tradesman's widow--was already explaining the reason of her journey, and he was listening with benignant interest. Three days later he returned the fee which was sent him, having deducted the third-class return fare, thanking us for our undeserved generosity, but explaining that he would count it a shame to grow rich through his services to knowledge. Some years afterwards I saw him in the distance, at a great public meeting, and when he mounted the platform the huge audience burst into prolonged applause, and were all the more delighted when he, who never had the remotest idea that people were honouring him, looked round, and discovering a pompous nonentity who followed him, clapped enthusiastically. And the only other time and the last that I saw him was on the street of a famous city, when he caught sight of a country woman dazed amid the people and the traffic, and afraid to cross to the other side. Whereupon our scholar gave the old woman his arm and led her carefully over, then he bowed to her, and shook hands with her, and I watched his tall form and white hair till he was lost in the distance. I never saw him again, for shortly after he had also passed over to the other side.

IV.--MY FRIEND THE TRAMP

ONE of the memorable and pitiable sights of the West, as the traveller journeys across the prairies, is the little group of Indians hanging round the lonely railway station. They are not dangerous now, nor are they dignified; they are harmless, poor, abject, shiftless, ready to beg or ready to steal, or to do anything else except work, and the one possession of the past which they still retain is the inventive and instinctive cunning of the savage, who can read the faintest sign like a written language, and knows the surest way of capturing his prey. One never forgets the squalid figure with some remains of former grandeur in his dress, and the gulf between us and this being of another race, unchanged amid the modern civilization. And then one comes home and suddenly recognizes our savages at our own doors.

Our savage tramps along our country roads, and loafs along our busy streets, he stops us with his whine when no policeman is near, and presents himself upon our doorstep, and when he is a master of his business he will make his way into our house. He has his own dress, combining many styles and various periods, though reduced to a harmony by his vagabond personality. He has his own language, which is unintelligible to strangers, and a complete system of communication by pictures. He marries and lives and dies outside civilization, sharing neither our habits nor our ideas, nor our labours, nor our religion, and the one infallible and universal badge of his tribe is that our savage will not work. He will hunger and thirst, he will sweat and suffer, he will go without shelter and without comfort, he will starve and die, but one thing he will not do, not even to get bread, and that is work; not even for tobacco, his dearest treasure and kindliest support, will he do fifteen minutes' honest labour. The first and last article in his creed, for which he is prepared to be a martyr and which makes him part of a community, is “I believe in idleness.” He has in him the blood of generations of nomads, and if taken off the roads, and compelled to earn his living would likely die. A general law of compulsory industry would bring the race to an end.

Besides his idleness he has many faults, for he is a liar to the bone, he is a drunkard whenever he can get the chance, he steals in small ways when it is safe, he bullies women if they are alone in a country house, he has not a speaking acquaintance with soap and water, and if he has any virtue it is not of a domestic character. He is ungrateful, treacherous, uncleanly, and vicious, to whom it is really wrong to give food, far more money, and to whom it is barely safe to give the shelter of an outhouse, far less one's roof. And yet he is an adroit, shrewd, clever, entertaining rascal. He carries the geography of counties in his head down to the minutest details which you can find on no map, knowing every mountain track, and forgotten footpath, every spring where he can get water, and the warmest corner in a wood where he can sleep. He has also another map in his memory of the houses with the people that dwell therein; which he ought to pass by, which it were a sin to neglect, which are worth trying, and which have changed hands. And he is ever carrying on his ordnance survey, and bringing information up to date; and as he and his fellows make a note of their experiences for those who follow after, it may be safely said that no one knows better either a country-side or its inhabitants from his own point of view than our friend the vagrant.

Perhaps the struggle for existence has quickened his wits beyond those of his race, but at any rate our vagabond is not fettered by that solid and conventional English intellect which persists in doing things as our fathers used to do them, and will not accommodate itself to changing conditions. Our vagabond has certain old lines which he has long practised and which he is always willing to use, in suitable circumstances, such as the workman out of employment and tramping to another city to get a job because he has not money enough to pay his railway fare, or a convalescent just discharged from hospital and making his way home to his wife and children, or a high-spirited man too proud to beg, and only anxious for a day's work (in some employment which cannot be found within twenty miles). And when he plays any of these rôles he is able to assume an air of interesting weariness as if he could not drag one leg after the other, and on occasion will cough with such skill as to suggest galloping consumption. And poor (but proud) he only allows the truth to be dragged from him after much hesitation. But when those lines fail and new inventions are needed for new times he rises to the occasion. If there be a great miner's strike he goes from town to town begging money for his wife and children at home, and explaining the hardships of a miner's life, which he has diligently, although superficially, learned; and after a war he is a reservist who threw up a profitable job at his country's call, and is now penniless and starving, but still unwaveringly patriotic; and if there be any interest in the sea through recent storm and shipwrecks, he also, this man of many trials and many journeys, has been saved with difficulty from the waves and lost his little all. If he calls upon a priest, he is careful to call him “Father,” and to pose as a faithful Catholic; and if he be an Irishman, his brogue then becomes a fortune, but if he drops in upon a Minister of the Kirk he recalls the good which he got when sitting in the West Kirk of Paisley; and if he be so fortunate as to be really Scots in blood, and therefore acquainted with theology, he will not only deceive that minister, but even the elect themselves, I mean the Caledonian Society. When the vagabond comes upon a home of simple lay piety, he allows it to be understood that he has led a life of fearful wickedness but is now a genuine penitent, asking only for the means of gaining an honest livelihood. He is fertile in devices and brilliant in execution, without any prejudices against the past or present, but ever bringing forth from his treasury of unabashed falsehood and ingenious impudence things new and old.

Our savage has also got, what I believe the Red Indians have not, an agreeable sense of humour, which no doubt is limited by practical details, but is in its way very captivating. What a stroke of delightful irony it was for a pair of our savages to take a long street between them, the man begging down the right-hand side, and the woman the left, while the man told a mournful tale of his wife's death, and asked money to get her a coffin that she might be respectably buried--he being poor (but proud) and a broken-hearted widower--as well as to clothe their two mourning little ones in black for the funerals, and for the woman to tell exactly the same story as she went down the opposite side of the street, except that it was her husband she was burying, and she poor (but proud) and a broken-hearted widow. They took no notice of one another across the street, and none when they completed their work at the further end, but a few minutes later they were sitting in the same public-house together, both wonderfully comforted and affording a remarkable illustration of the dead burying their dead.

Our vagabond is a superb actor within his own province, and greatly enjoys a triumph in any conflict with the enemy. He was one day singing the “Sweet By-and-By” with such a voice and so much unctuous emotion that I lost patience, and broke out on him for his laziness and profanity. For a moment he was almost confounded, and then he assumed an air of meek martyrdom suggestive of a good man who had been trying to do his little best for the salvation of his fellow-creatures, and was being persecuted for righteousness sake. This was for the benefit of a simple-minded old gentleman who had been greatly shocked at my remarks, and now, as a rebuke to an ungodly and unsympathetic clergyman and an encouragement to humble piety, gave the vagabond a shilling. “God bless you,” he said with much feeling to the philanthropist, and started again the “Sweet By-and-By”! but before we parted he tipped me a wink over his victory, charged with inexpressible humour.

When one of the savages honoured our humble home by calling one day as an incapacitated member of the Mercantile Marine and obtained half-a-crown from my tender-hearted wife, partly through sympathy, but also through alarm, because the suffering sailor proposed to exhibit the sores upon his legs, I knew that the tidings would be carried far and wide throughout the nearest tribe, our local Black-feet as it were, and that we would be much favoured in days to come. So we were, by other sailors, also with sores, by persons who had been greatly helped by my preaching in the years of long ago, by widow women full of sorrow and gin, by countrymen stranded helpless in a big unsympathetic city, till our house was little better than a casual ward. Then I took the matter in hand and interviewed the next caller, who had been long out of employment, but had now obtained a job and only wanted the means of living till Monday when he would be independent of everybody. He had spent his last penny the day before on a piece of bread, and had tasted nothing since. “Not even drink,” I ventured to inquire, for by this time the air round me was charged with alcohol, when he replied with severe dignity that he had been a teetotaller since his boyhood. Then I addressed him briefly but clearly, explaining that the half-crown had been given by mistake, that we were greatly obliged for the visit of his friends, that I had enjoyed his own call, but that it would save a great deal of trouble to both sides if he would only intimate to his fellow-tribesmen and women when they gathered round the camp fire in the evening that there was no more spoil to be obtained at our house. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and a smile came over his face. “I'm fly,” he said. And then as he went out at the door he turned for a last shot, “Look here, sir, if you give me a bob, I'll join your church, and be an elder in a month.” A fellow of infinite jest, and I gave him a shilling, but without conditions.

The humour of our nomad is always practical, and when it masters him it sweeps all professional hypocrisy before it like a water-flood, and reveals the real man. Certainly quite unclothed, but also quite unashamed. He had told his story so artfully, with such care in detail and such conviction in tone, that I did believe for the moment that he was a poor Scot trying to get home by sea to Glasgow, together with his wife and four children, that he had obtained his passage-money from the Caledonian Society, and that he only needed a little money for food and such like expenses. This money I gave him somewhat lavishly, and yet not quite without suspicion, and he left full of gratitude and national enthusiasm. Three years later a man got entrance to my study on the grounds of Christianity and nationality, and before he addressed me directly I thought that I knew his voice. When he explained that he had got his passage to Glasgow from that noble institution, the Caledonian Society, but that as he had a wife and four children... I was sure we had met before, and I offered to do the rest of the story myself, which I did with such an accurate memory that he listened with keen appreciation like a composer to the playing of his own piece, and only added when I had finished, “So I did it here afore. Well, sir, ye may take my word for it, it's the first mistake I've made in my business.” And he departed with the self-conceit of the Scots only slightly chastened.

V.--OUR BOY