Part 2

There she lay in the wet all forenoon, very dignified and at ease in death. But distresses were at hand. After mid-day I saw a thin white dog, come out of nowhere, high-trotting over the grass, his tail feathering, his nose in the wind. He tacked to the corpse, sniffed at it from a spear’s length, then spurned it after the manner of his race, and slowly retired. Not for very long. He had discovered a hankering as he went, which became irresistible, and drew him back to satisfy it. I watched him. This time he came, not adventurously, but as on secret errand, furtively, creeping cat-footed by the stone wall--much, I thought, as Amina would have skirted the graveyard. When he had to take to the open he approached by broad tacks north and south, and at the last came on with a rush. I saw him attack the silent thing, pull out large tufts of wool, from which he fiercely shook himself free. He did more than that before I shouted, and threatened with my hand. Then he slipped rapidly away, at a loping gallop, with many a look behind to where I stood on the brow. He was only the first. Looking out again, I saw a black-and-white dog, with his head busy in the carcase, and down by the river another on the way. I had seen in my day jackals about a dead camel, and did not want that sort of thing rehearsed in Eskdale. In my own country we feed our sheep-dogs, and should discourage them from helping themselves to braxy mutton, lest they might acquire a taste for meat of their own killing. Besides, I respected what had seemed to me a dignified end of days. So I drove off the two ghouls and went down to do what I could. I was too late. She had suffered the last indignity. She was dragged over on to her back, her head was awry, her lips riven apart to show her teeth; and she was disembowelled. However, I did what there was to do, covered her with a loose field-gate, heaped upon that coping-stones from the wall, made a kind of cairn. Then I went over to the farm to see the farmer’s wife.

She said--merely humouring my queasiness--that the remains should be shifted. And they were. A leggy young thrall made short work of my defences, and dragged the sheep by a hind-leg into a spinney of sycamores near by. Thereabouts I saw the dogs gather themselves together at shut of day, and I heard their snapping and snarling over their uneasy meal. I heard it far into the night, where under cover of dark the dead sheep was consumed with obscene rites. Nothing but bared bones will be left; but they will remain undisturbed to gleam in the murky wood for a season, inchmeal to be resumed into the soil.

THE SOLITARY REAPER

The Evangelist, when he said that the field was white already to harvest, was thinking of some grain which we know not in Wilts. Our broad acres are deep orange, some of them near the colour of rust. He might have had oats in his mind’s eye, not a staple of ours. Here and there they show up patches of silver-grey; but most of our corn is red wheat, a noble increase. In a burning summer such as this the familiar scene takes on the bleached glare and fierce hue of Spain or Provence. I had a train journey yesterday across West Wilts through hills all drab and tawny. The corn is shoulder-high, heavy in ear, bolt upright; a sight, you would say, as I do, to thank God for. From all sides comes the sound of the reaper, a rattle when horse-drawn, but a scream when petrol drives it, a restless disagreeable noise, not only anti-social, but unsociable. I regret the happy accidents of the vanished harvests: the reapers with their attendant girls binding after them, the busy, thirsty, brawling Irishmen; the sharp swish of the scythe which succeeded the hook and was always a pleasant sound, whether as it slashed down the straw, or when the stone tinkled rhythmically against the blade; the work in file, the noonday rest in companies--all gone now. I passed a hundred-acre field yesterday where cutting had just begun. One man was reaping it.

Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain: O listen! for the vale profound Is overflowing with the sound.

It was indeed! For “she” was a machine.

“It may be wholesome but it is not good,” as Nebuchadnezzar said, munching the “unfamiliar food.” One misses the human note in agriculture, always its most pronounced and amiable feature, the thing in particular which gave poignancy to the festival which we shall celebrate this year earlier than any man here can mind our doing. The children’s holidays begin, too, this week, in obedience to what is now a forlorn convention--a mere vestige like the human appendix. For the children now have no part in harvesting. They used to twist the bonds for their mothers and sisters; but the machine does all that now, the exorbitant monster, with twine. I suppose that the hiles, as we call them, are still set up by men’s hands--that is all there is left of what used to be our high season of the mingling of both sexes, all classes, and all ages. I regret, and I fear too. If the “solitary reaper” is but the prelude to the golden age of Mr. Sidney Webb’s dream, when farms are to be measured by their square-mileage, and farming conducted in a box by a man with a switch-board in front of him, a man who might be in Whitehall for anything that appears--why, then the country will become as the town; life will be a game of automaton chess-players; and I shall go and grow vanilla in a Pacific island. Of all Utopias yet devised by the academic, Mr. Webb’s appears to me the most ghastly, and luckily also the least likely to be realised. There are “little men” here still growing corn, reaping it still with sickle and hook; and perhaps some of them are threshing it with flails, and winnowing it in the wind on floors like that of Ornan the Jebuzite. They do that still in Greece, for I have seen the floors. I don’t despair of seeing some here, where Mr. Webb’s _automata_ are not visible. We are most of us “little men” at heart.

INTERIORS

Now is the time of year when you see interiors at their best--interiors and all that they involve and imply. The warmth and light of the earth concentre there, and he is unhappy--a figure for Hans Andersen--who has not hearth to reach and household gods to await him. Meantime, however he be hastening towards them, he will look, not without longing, through still uncurtained windows, mark the leaping fire, the shaded lamp, the tea-table and its attendant guests, and feel a glow and (I am sure) a momentary pang. Perhaps we are exorbitant lovers, perhaps we dread to know how lonely we are. I don’t care to say. But certainly we are creatures of the light; and where that is, there must we be.

Familiar as we are with ourselves, and often enough bored to tears with the fellow, we are so blankly ignorant of each other that we can set no bounds to our curiosity. Thence comes part, at least, of the charm of lit interiors, that we think to surprise the inhabitants at their mysteries, catch them unawares and find out what they do when no one is looking at them--or they believe it. This is no case for Peeping Tom of Coventry: the need is much too urgent for unwholesome prying. Honestly, we require to be certified that we are not alone, unique in the world. Besides, inspection, you may say, is invited; or it is ignored. Your hastening steps down a village street at dusk may lead you through a picture-gallery, so free are the indwellers of their concerns: I have been gladdened by enchanting scenes through narrow window-frames or magic casements. Once it was of children--four little girls in pinafores, in a row behind a long table, all stooped over bread and milk in yellow bowls. The eldest I put at about ten; from her they ran down to four or five. So good, and so busy--“forty feeding like one!” But there were only four of them so far as I could see. As they stooped, their hair fell forward to curtain their faces. It was what the French call _cendré_, very glossy and smooth, and curling at the ends. They did not speak, just shovelled; but just as I passed I saw the little one at the bottom of the row perform the feat of turning a pretty large spoon completely round in a pretty small mouth; and as she did it she looked sideways at someone hidden from me (presiding, no doubt, over the tea-cups), to ascertain if she had been caught in the act. I declare that I saw triumph and anxiety contending in her eyes. And she _had_ been caught, not by the president, but by her elder sister at the other end of the line. There too I saw reproof hovering. Happy, busy, neat little creatures! I tell you I felt myself an exile as I passed that haunt of peace and warmth! And so one always does, I believe, whatsoever welcome await you at the end of your journey. You ask--or I did--How come they to leave _me_ outside in the dark? Don’t they know that I am one with them all?

I have seen a mother reading to her girls at work, and longed to know what the book was, whether I had read it. If, as I believed, it was Miss Alcott, then I was all right. I have seen a boy rigging a three-masted vessel at a table, and knew by the way he was biting his tongue how happy he was. And I have seen comedies for Molière. I saw topers once in a tap-room, and a man in a cut-away coat and a shocking hat standing up and trying to make good and not succeeding. He did not belong to their parts--that was evident. I guessed him to be an outlier from some race-meeting or other. But there he was, inside, warm, and at least smelling the good cheer, and there he hoped to remain. He was doing it, or trying it, on his gift--which was tongues. I don’t suppose that I was thirty seconds passing that window, if so much; yet I could see decisively that he wanted them to believe in him, and how badly. They, a plain-faced, weather-seamed row, were not taking any. They were tired with their day’s work, leaned to the wall, their legs, I am sure, stretched out at length. Each with one horny hand held his pipe in its place; one and all they looked down at their feet, and listened, and judged him for a poor thing. The things you see!

They are not always so pleasant. Sometimes they can be pretty tragic when you come to work them out. I passed a house once on the outskirts of a country town, and across a laurel hedge and iron fence, and between the branches of a monkey-puzzler, could see into a lighted room. Not much to be seen, you might think. Gas was burning in a central chandelier behind ground-glass globes. An engraving in a gilt frame on a green wall; something in a tall glass case before the window. I did not see the _aspidestris_, which must have been there. Then, on one side of the fire a man in a black coat, asleep, and on the other a woman in a white shawl, asleep--and that was all. Yes, but wait. I remember a trial at some Assizes years ago, where a man was arraigned for killing his wife. He pleaded not guilty, as of course; but the evidence was clear. He had killed her with a chopper in the scullery. He was convicted and sentenced to death, having had nothing to say. Before his execution, but not long before it, he told the chaplain of the gaol what he had done, and why. He said that he had been married to the woman for twenty years; that they did not quarrel, but had got out of the way of speaking to one another, and, in fact, practically never did. It had not affected him for some time, he said; but one evening, suddenly, it did. One evening he was struck with horror, palsy-struck with the reflection: “Good God! I have sat dumb before this woman, she dumb before me, for twenty years, and we may have to sit so for another twenty.” He said that from that moment the thought never left him, that the horror of the prospect daunted him, and that by and by his heart failed him. He knew then that he could not do it. Some wild resentment, some hot inconsiderate grudge wrought madness in him--to that shocking end. By ordinary we do not use our imagination, and so escape very likely as much misery as happiness, glory and the like. But if the picture-making faculty awake of itself, blaze the future at us, so vividly that we cannot doubt of its truth--what then? Why, then, as often as not, despondency and madness. I had no envy of that gas-illumined room, and was contented to be a stranger to that disgruntled pair.

I have seen other things of sharper savour, where passion clearly was involved, and, as it seemed, the creatures themselves uncurtained as well as the room they occupied. Two of them, related long ago, I shall always remember: the first, seen by chance from a window of the Army and Navy Stores, which looked out over the purlieus of Westminster towards the river. That showed me a mean second-floor bedroom just over the way, and a little maid-servant in it, down at heels, draggled, her cap awry, dusting and tidying up. All familiar, uninteresting, a matter of routine, until suddenly I saw her throw her head up--a gesture of real abandonment--and fall on her knees beside the bed. She buried her face in her bare arm; and I moved away. That was no place for me. Startling though, to be jolted out of the smooth apparatus of shopping, away from obsequious service and the accepted convention, in return for my half-crowns, that I was a temporary lord of the earth. All a sham, that; but there across the street, in a frowsy bedroom, was reality--a soul and its Disposer face to face.

The other was revealed when, as a very young man, I had chambers in Old Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn. My bedroom there backed upon slums, but was above them, being almost in the roof of a tall old house. One night, very late, I was going to bed, and leaned far out of my window to get air and see the stars. Before, and below me rather, rose a dark wall of houses, entirely blind but for one lighted window. That revealed a shabby sitting-room--a table with a sewing-machine and paraffin lamp; little else. There was a man sitting by the table in his shirt-sleeves; he was smoking while he read the evening paper. Then a door opened and a tall, youngish woman came in. She was in white--evidently in her nightdress--and her loose hair was about her shoulders. She stood between door and table, resting her hand; I don’t think that she spoke. The man, aware or unaware, went on reading. But presently he looked up: their eyes met. He threw down pipe and paper and went to her. He dropped to his knees, clasped hers, and bent his head to his hands. All that I had seen before--I knew what I was doing--but I saw no more. What did it mean? Husband and wife? Sinner and saviour? What do I know?

THE PLIGHT OF THEIR GRACES

The mills of God grind as the poet has declared, and they grind to the same measure both the illustrious and the obscure. Naturally one hears more of the sorrows of the great. The wailing of a duke will carry the length of the realm, and since America is now interested domestically in that estate it will reverberate in the Western continent also. The Duke of Bedford has lately exhibited a part of his case to readers of _The Times_, the Duke of Portland more explicitly his to his friends and neighbours. Both their graces say in effect that the thing can’t be done. They do not tell us why not; but we can infer it. To do things properly, Welbeck and Woburn require some thirty housemaids; and how are they to find thirty housemaids, or, having found them, as things now are, pay for them? They do not ask, but the question follows for the plainer sort, why should a man stand in the ridiculous position of requiring thirty housemaids?

It so happens that I have just been to Woburn for the first time in my life, have made the circuit of the great wall, some ten feet high and, I daresay, ten miles round, have entered at one fine gate and issued at another after a traverse of the noble spaces of the park, in which herds of deer, occasional ostriches, lamas, bisons, remote and solitary buffaloes, and heaven knows what, were to be seen peacefully feeding, as if no kind of anxiety was fretting the peace and amplitude of it all. The trees, the boscages, the lake, the great piled grey house unapproachable of the vulgar, the model villages with their cottage-fronts all stamped with a crowned B--all these splendid established things passed by me like an opium-eater’s dream: all so seeming secure, inevitable and right; all, actually, so shaky, doomed, and infernally wrong. And with the Lord of Welbeck’s wail in my ears, I also saw that, truly, it could not be done.

It is not a matter of housemaids alone. It is a matter of gardeners, of woodmen, of a permanent staff of masons and bricklayers--for with a wall of ten feet by ten miles there will always be repairs. Other services in proportion. Where are we then? I avoid arithmetic for excellent reasons; but I do see that thirty housemaids at £50 a year apiece plus board come to £3,000 a year, and that the others will figure out accordingly. How is it to be done? It is not. And why should it be done? God knows.

Whether their Graces know is another matter. I think that they are beginning to know--but even so, they are only at the beginning of the problem. For it is not so easy as it sounds just to drop Welbeck or Woburn and live _en pension_ at Dieppe. What are you to do with Welbeck in the meantime? And if you don’t want it yourself, who, do you suppose, will want it? And let it be remembered that their Graces, besides Welbeck and Woburn, possess each another house, not made with hands, an indestructible house. They are dukes for ever after the order of Melchisedech. Like snails, wherever they go--to Dieppe, to a flat in the Temple, to a caravan, to the banks of the Susquehanna--they must carry that blazoned house on their backs. And I cannot imagine a more inhospitable or superfluous mansion for the life of me.

The only nobility worth talking about is one of birth, and even that won’t bear talking about very seriously. Lord Chesterfield, the famous one of the family, had a gallery of ancestors which was a wonder to behold of completeness and splendour. But he was wise enough to correct it with two pictures: a scrubby old man, labelled Adam de Stanhope, and a scrubby old woman, Eve de Stanhope. He had the values straightened out thus wittily, at any rate for himself. Then there was the family-tree of the Wynns, or another Welsh house, which had an asterisk some distance down, with a note attached: “About this time the creation of the world took place.” This is perhaps all very foolish, but we can understand it.

We supplemented that intelligible aristocracy in our country, first with an aristocracy of office, and then with one of rank; and it is on those in particular that the economic crisis presses. Noble birth is a matter of tradition and, so to speak, of God’s grace. If you are nobly born you may black boots, sell matches or beg at a church door. Hidalgos, grandees of Spain, do these things in their own country, and remain grandees of Spain. Even ignoble pursuits cannot stultify noble birth. There it is. Official nobility, too, is very well, while ability to office persists: but that kind died out because ability to office refused to be hereditary. The first Earls were governors of earldoms, that is of counties. The first Viscounts were Vicecomites, Sheriffs. But Lord Viscount Northcliffe is not a sheriff. If he is an aristocrat it is by virtue of rank. Now rank is not quite like beauty. Handsome is as handsome does, we know; but rank is as rank is able to be. You may make a man a duke, of course, but it is possible that he will make himself ridiculous; and if he does that, and if he does it often enough, and if there are enough of him, he will make the Fountain of Honour itself ridiculous. I don’t know who was the first of our kings to ennoble, his Quelconques, his “unfortunate females,” as Carlyle used to say: I think it was Henry VIII; but whoever he was he sowed the seed of a fungus in the ranks of the peers. One knows what the French kings did, what Charles II, what the Hanoverians did. Whether, when the politicians took control of the Fountain of Honour and commercialised its golden waters, they did any worse, it were hard to say. They made common what had already become vulgar. The peerage of late years is only less absurd because it is less conspicuous. That at least is to the good. Yet there remains this last thing to be said about it. An aristocracy of birth is self-sufficient, but one of rank demands self-evidence, quite a different matter. It drives you back upon wealth, without which it is an absurdity. A grandee of Spain selling matches will pass--but how about a Caroline or Georgian marquess driving a taxi, or taking his turn at a music-hall?

M. Henri Lavedan wrote a novel upon that theme, a cynical, witty, bitter, rattling novel, too, called “Le Bon Temps.” A party of Parisians, men about town and their ladies, is lunching _al fresco_ at Armenonville or some such on a fine morning in May. A hurdy-gurdy sounds a familiar air outside, which touches the tender top of some quill in one of the _convives_. “Let’s have the old chap in,” he moves the company. “He’s playing the _Blue Danube_, and will renew the youth for some of us.” They have him in, a tattered, bearded, bright-eyed _vecchio_, his instrument slung by a greasy strap to one shoulder, on the other a foolish little troubled monkey in a red velveteen petticoat. He lifts his old hat and recommences his grinding. One of the guests covers his eyes, and so remains until the grinder has gone. Then he lifts his head. “Do you know who that was?” “Not I indeed!” “That was the Duc d’Epervier.” Then he tells the story of _Le Bon Temps: Wein, Weib, und Gesang_, a rattling tale with a croak in it.

“Why do the people imagine a vain thing?” This is a case for tags.

THE VILLAGE

The gardener told my housekeeper, and she told me, that the policeman’s wife had a baby. I said, Splendid! or Good!--it was one or the other--which will show you that I knew what I was about. To have said less than that--to have said simply, “Oh,” or “Why not?” would have been to fail in tact. For in the village we take such a thing as a baby seriously. We call it Increase, not a baby, in the old fashion, and disregard the new probability that, while it may be so in one sense, there are several in which it may well be called Decrease. When a patriarch’s--or, I should say here, a Druid’s--wife had a baby, both she and the Druid knew that, barring accidents, it would work for him, if it was a boy, and in due course bring in a wife of its own, and Increase of its own--all to work for the Druid until he died. Or, if it was a girl, he would sell it to a neighbouring Druid for measures of corn or heads of cattle. Increase then all round, however it turned out. But it is different now. We have the name without the thing. If it is a boy, as in fact the policeman’s is, it will be no use to him until it is fifteen, and not much then. Suppose it gets a job somewhere handy, it will pay its mother, say, five shillings a week, a bare subsistence. At twenty, if still living at home, that may be increased to ten shillings. Clothes and a motor-bike will somehow come out of the rest. Precious little Increase there. And soon after twenty it will marry and disappear from the household. But still the village holds by the old fashion, and calls a boy-baby Increase. I have heard girls dignified by the same title, though it is not so invariable. Yet there is more chance of a girl proving useful to her parents than of a boy’s being so. It depends entirely on the mother, whether as the child grows up it finds out that she won’t stand any nonsense. There are still such mothers left--I know two or three; but their numbers diminish with every additional nonsense that crops up.